Radiant Motherhood 



/ 

v. 

Radiant Motherhood 

ok for Those Who are Creating the 
Future 



By 
Marie Carmichael Stopes 

Doctor of Science, London; Doctor of Philosophy, Munich; 

Fellow of University College, London; Fellow of the 

Royal Society of Literature and the Linnean 

Society, London 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 
Zbc Knickerbocker press 

192 1 



H^ 1 
31 



Copyright, 1921 

BY 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



MAR I I 1921 




Printed in the United States of America 



, , 



g) CI. A 6 8 6 4 9 



Dedicated to Young Husbands and 
All Who are Creating the Future 



PREFACE 

This book is written for the same young people 
who inspired Married Love. Many of my readers 
have asked me to write such a book as this, and 
I sincerely hope that it will not disappoint them. 
Many, many people have contributed facts which 
have helped me to write it. The book, however, 
is pre-eminently the work of my baby son and his 
father, whose beautiful spirits have been, and will 
be, through all eternity united with me in a burn- 
ing desire to bring light into dark places. 

M. C. S. 



CONTENTS 

3APTER PAGE 

I. — The Lover's Dream i 

II. — Conceived in Beauty io 

III. — The Gateway of Pain ... 21 

IV. — The Young Mother-to-be: Her 

Amazements .... 37 

V. — The Young Mother-to-be: Her 

Delights . .... 44 

VI. — The Young Mother-to-be: Her 

Distresses . . . -49 

VII. — The Young Father-to-be: His 

Amazements . . -58 

VIII. — The Young Father-to-be: His 

Delights 65 

IX. — The Young Father-to-be: His 

Distresses .... 70 

X. — Physical Difficulties of the 

Expectant Mother ... 80 

vii 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER 

XI. — Physical Difficulties of the 
Expectant Father 

XII. — The Union of Three 

XIII. — The Procession of the Months 

XIV. — Pre-Natal Influence . 

XV. — Evolving Types of Women 

XVI. — Birth and Beauty 

XVII— Baby's Rights 

XVIII. — The Weakest Link in the Human 
Chain 

XIX. — The Cost of Coffins 

XX. — The Creation of a New and Irradi 
ated Race .... 



104 
in 

125 
144 
162 
179 
191 

204 
225 

233 



Vlll 



Radiant Motherhood 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 



CHAPTER I 

THE LOVER'S DREAM 

So every spirit, as it is most pure, 

And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 

So it the fairer bodie doth procure 
To habit in, and it more fairly light, 
With cheareful grace and amiable sight. 

For if the soule the bodie form doth take: 

For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. 

Spenser : A n Hymne of Beautie. 

EVERY lover desires a child. Those who 
imagine the contrary, and maintain that 
love is purely selfish, know only of the 
lesser types of love. The supreme love of true 
mates always carries with it the yearning to per- 
petuate the exquisite quality of its own being, and 
to record, through the glory of its mutual creation, 
other lives yet more beautiful and perfect. 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

Existence being such a difficult compromise 
between our dreams and the material facts of 
the world, this desire may sometimes be thwarted 
by factors outside itself; may even be so sup- 
pressed as to he invisible in the conduct, and 
unsuspected in the wishes of the lover. Yet the 
desire to link their lives with the future is deeply 
woven into the love of all sound and healthy 
people who love supremely. 

It is commonly said that most women marry 
for children, and not out of a personal love, and 
there is more truth in this saying than is good for 
the race. To-day, alas, many women cannot find 
the perfect and sensitive mate their hearts desire, 
and they hope in any marriage . to get children 
which will mitigate the consequent loneliness of 
their lives. Sometimes they may, to some extent, 
succeed, but far less often than they imagine, for 
that strange and still but little understood force 
" heredity' ' steps in, v and the son of the tolerated 
father may grow infinitely more like hi^ physical 
father than he is like the dear delight his mother 
dreamed he might be. 

Few girls have not pictured in day dreams the 
joy of holding in their arms their own beautiful 

2 



THE LOVER'S DREAM 

babies. No man of their acquaintance, however, 
may seem fine enough to be their father. Until 
she has been crushed by experience, or unless she 
listens with absolute belief to the depressing 
information of her elders, each girl believes that 
her own intense desire for perfection will be the 
principal factor in creating the beautiful babies of 
her dreams. Often it seems as though this power 
were granted, for women sometimes bear lovely 
children by fathers in whom one may seek in vain 
for any bodily grace or charm. 

The century-long working of economic laws 
based on physical force, the remnants of which 
still affect us, has resulted in man generally having 
the selective power, and tending to choose for his 
wife the most beautiful or charming woman that 
his means allow ; hence, hitherto, on the whole, the 
race has been bred from the better and more 
beautiful women. This has undoubtedly tended 
to keep the standard of physical form from sinking 
to the utter degradation which we see in the worst 
of the slums, and in institutions where live the 
feeble-minded offspring of inferior mothers who 
have wantonly borne children of fathers devoid of 
any realization of what they were doing. 

3 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

From these avenues of shame and misery, how- 
ever, I must steer my line of thought, for this book 
is written pre-eminently for the young, happy, and 
physically well-conditioned pair, who, mating 
beautifully on all the planes of their existence, are 
living in married love. 

Whether early in the days of their marriage, or 
postponed for some months or more out of regard 
for his wife's body and beauty, the hour will come 
when the young husband yearning above her, 
sees in his wife's eyes the reflection of the future, 
and when their mutual longing springs up to ini- 
tiate the chain of lives which shall repeat through- 
out the ages the bodily, mental, and spiritual 
beauties of each other, which each holds so dear. 
Perhaps in lovers' talk and exquisite whispers they 
have spoken of this great deed on which they are 
embarking, and each has voiced that intense 
yearning which filled them to see another "with 
your eyes, your hair, your smile," living and radi- 
ant. The lovers dream that they will be repeated 
in others of their own creation, always young, 
running through the ages which culminate in the 
golden glories of the millennium. 

The dream is so wonderful, the thought that 
4 



THE LOVER'S DREAM 

it pictures in the mind so full of vernal beauty, 
light, and vigour that, were facts commensurate 
with it, its result should spring all ready formed 
from between the lips of those who breathed its 
possibilities like Minerva from the head of Jove. 

It seems incredible that such splendid dominant 
designs to fulfil God's purpose should be hindered, 
and made to bend and toil through the hard 
material facts of the molecular structure of the 
world, and that it is only many months afterwards 
that the first outward body is given to this dream; 
and that then it is in a form not strong and danc- 
ing in lightness and beauty, but weak and helpless, 
with many intensely physical necessities which for 
months and years will require the utmost fostering 
care, or it will be destroyed by material effects, 
hostile and too strong for it. Yet such is the 
limitation of our powers of creation. And under- 
neath the intense passion of love and all its rich 
dreams of beauty is the slow building, chemically 
molecule by molecule, biologically cell by cell, 
against obstacles the surmounting of which seems 
a superhuman feat. 

Lovers who are parents give to each other the 
supremest material gift in the world, a material 

5 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

embodiment of celestial dreams, which itself has 
the further power of vital creation. 

In my book, Married Love, I speak to the normal, 
healthy, and loving, in an endeavour to help them 
to remain normal, healthy, and loving, and thus to 
perfect their lives; so in this book I do not intend 
to deal with those whose marriages are mistaken 
ones, or with those who do not know true love. 
I write for those who, having made a love match, 
are passing together through the ensuing and sur- 
prising years, and, incidentally, doing one of the 
greatest pieces of work which human beings can do 
during their progress through this world, and that 
is creating the next generation. 

In nature, the consummation of the physical 
act of union between lovers generally results in 
the conception of a new life. We share the physi- 
cal aspects of mating and the resulting parenthood 
with most of the woodland creatures. How far 
many of the lowlier lives are conscious of the 
future results of their mating unions is a problem 
in elementary psychology beyond the realm of 
present knowledge. But that parenthood is the 
natural result of their union is to-day known, one 
must suppose, by almost all young couples who 

6 



THE LOVER'S DREAM 

wed. I am still uncertain how far the two are 
conscious of this in the early days of their union, 
when every circumstance encourages that supreme 
self-centredness of happy youth. Much must de- 
pend on the age, and on the previous experience 
and education of the two ; much also on their rela- 
tive natures. A profoundly introspective and 
thoughtful man and woman are more liable than 
others to be speedily aware of the many interwoven 
strands of their joint lives, and to live consciously 
on several planes of existence simultaneously. 

The supreme act of physical unions, as I have 
shown in my book, Married Love, consists funda- 
mentally of three essential and widely differing 
reactions, having effects in correspondingly differ- 
ent regions. There is (a) the intimately personal 
effect on the internal secretions and general vital- 
ity of the individual partaking of that sacrament; 
(6) there is the social effect of the union of the two 
in a mutual act in which they must so perfectly 
blend and harmonize; and (c) there is the racial 
result which may lead to the procreation of a new 
life. 

In the early days of the honeymoon, personal 
passion and the concentrated delight of each in the 

7 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

mate is probably more than sufficient, in all its 
rich complexity, to fill the consciousness of the two 
who are thus united in a life-long comradeship to 
form that highest unit, the pair. But, as educa- 
tion and the conscious control of our lives grow, 
the young pair who are so blissfully self-centred as 
not to remember, or not to be aware of the racial 
effects of their acts are probably decreasing in 
numbers. Among the best of those who marry 
to-day, the majority only enter upon parenthood, 
or the possibility of parenthood, when they feel 
■justified in so doing. The young man who pro- 
foundly loves his wife, and who considers the 
future benefit of their child, protects her from 
accidental conception, or from becoming a mother, 
at times when the strain upon her would be too 
great, or when he is unable to give her and the 
coming child the necessary care and support. 
That myriads of children are born without this 
consideration on the part of their parents applies 
to the commonalty of mankind, but not to the 
best. 

Often to-day the betrothed young couple will 
speak openly and beautifully of the children they 
hope to have, while others, equally full of the 

8 



THE LOVER'S DREAM 

beautiful dream, feel it too tender a subject to 
put into words, and may marry without ever hav- 
ing given expression to the possibility that they 
will generate through their love, yet other lovers. 



CHAPTER II 

CONCEIVED IN BEAUTY 

She, as a veil, down to the slender waist 

Her unadorned golden tresses wore, 

. . . half her swelling breast 

Naked met his beneath the flowing gold . . . 

Nor those mysterious parts were then concealed . . . 

Nor gentle purpose nor endearing smiles 

Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems 

Fair couple linked in happy nuptial league. 

. . . Underfoot the violet, 

Crocus and hyacinth with rich inlay 

Broidered the ground . . . here in cool recess 

With flowers, garlands and sweet smelling herbs 

Espoused Eve dekt first her nuptial bed 

And heavenly quires the hymenean sung. 

.... Into their inmost bow'r 

Handed they went; and eased the putting off 

Those troublesome disguises which we wear, 

Straight side by side were laid, nor turned 

Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites 

Mysterious of connubial love refused . . . 

Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights 

His constant lamp . . . here reigns and revels. 

And on their naked limbs the flowery roof 

Showered roses which the morn repaired. Sleep on 

Blest pair. 

Milton : Paradise Lost, 

IN the ancient Sanskrit, there is a work dealing 
minutely with love, and with the different 
forms its expression takes in different types of 
people. This has been modified, added to, and re- 

10 



CONCEIVED IN BEAUTY 

written by many later authors, and under various 
names works based on this are to be found in the 
Sanskrit and translated into various Indian dialects. 

In these volumes much that is curious, and to 
Western nations, absurd, is to be found; but also 
several profound observations which appear to be 
based on truths generally ignored by us. One of 
the interesting themes of these very early writers 
is a recognition and a description of the character- 
istics of the best and most perfect type of woman, 
the "Padmini." In addition to describing fully 
her physical appearance and characteristics, it is 
observed that she being a child of light and not of 
darkness, prefers the supreme act of love to take 
place in the daylight rather than the dark. 

In this country, owing to our artificial, over- 
burdened, and over-strained lives, the physical 
union of lovers is almost always confined to the 
night time. Indeed, crowded as we are in cities 
and suburban districts, solitude in Nature is im- 
possible; for most seclusion is only known in a 
closed room after dark. The Sanskrit writer of the 
sixth century, however, takes love more seriously 
than we do, and he describes how, for the sacred 
union, serious preparation of beauty should be 

ii 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

made — a room or natural arbour decked with 
flowers; and for the supreme expression of love, 
(that is the love between a pair each of the highest 
and most perfect type), this should take place in 
the light of day and not the darkness of the night. 
Even in our present degraded civilization, there 
are some who do realize the sacredness and the 
value of the bodily embrace in the fresh beauty of 
nature and sunlight. There must be many, and 
I know of several beautiful children who were con- 
ceived from unions which took place under natural 
conditions of light and open air radiance. The 
naturally best time for conception is the summer, 
when our air is mild and sweet enough for true love 
in Nature's way. 

In an empire where woodland or seaside solitude 
is not obtainable by lovers for this their most 
sacred function, the distribution of the population 
is gravely wrong. It will, however, probably for 
some time to come be difficult, for those who desire 
such a profound return to natural rectitude, to 
obtain the necessary security of seclusion amid 
beautiful surroundings, and it will, therefore, in 
all probability, long remain only possible to most 
lovers to ramble together in nature, and then later 

12 



CONCEIVED IN BEAUTY 

to follow the usual course of uniting within their 
room. 

We do not know enough about ourselves or the 
results of our actions, under our present conditions, 
to realize to what extent the hour of conception 
modifies the quality of the offspring. We only 
know that the child of lovers beautiful in mind and 
body, the child ardently desired by them, whose 
coming is prepared with every beauty which it is in 
their power to obtain, is often well worth all the 
outlay of love and thought. Certainly among 
those personally known to me who have followed 
the rather exceptional course I indicate, the child- 
ren are remarkable for both physical beauty and 
exquisite vitality, balanced with sweetness and 
strength of mental and spiritual qualities. 

There is an old and, in my opinion, valuable 
view (although it has not been "scientifically 
proved") that the actual hour of conception, the 
condition of the parents at the moment when 
the germs fuse, is one of vital consequences to the 
child-to-be. Scientific proof of this will be, of 
course, extraordinarily difficult to discover, but, 
indirectly, there do appear to be some actual data 
in favour of the converse, namely, that temporary 

13 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

unhealthy states of the parents result in the con- 
ceptions of children so inferior as to be markedly 
and seriously anti-social. Porel says: 1 

The recent researches of Bezzola seem to prove that 
the old belief in the bad quality of children conceived 
during drunkenness is not without foundation. Rely- 
ing on the Swiss census of 1900, in which there figure 
nine thousand idiots . . . this author has proved 
that there are two acute annual maximum periods for 
the conception of idiots (calculated from nine months 
before birth), the periods of carnival and vintage, 
when the people drink most. In the wine-growing 
districts, the maximum conception of idiots at the 
time is enormous, while it is almost nil at other 
periods. 

It is, of course, not always possible to arrange 
the hour of the union which will lead to concep- 
tion. And, further, even when the hour of the 
union is arranged, nature, to some extent, controls 
and may modify conditions before conception. 
Sometimes the fertilization of the egg cell by the 
sperm cell takes place in the hour of the bodily 
union of the lovers, sometimes this inner pro- 
cess is delayed by hours or days. 2 Conception is 

1 Sexual Question, 1908. 
3 Forel, Sexual Question, p. 96. 

14 



CONCEIVED IN BEAUTY 

possible in most women at almost any time dur- 
ing the years of potential motherhood; yet there 
do appear to be several factors which lead to 
the potential fertility of a woman varying very 
much from time to time. Some women, for in- 
stance, appear to be liable to conceive only for a 
certain number of days in each month, and these 
are in general the two or three days immediately 
following the monthly period, and the day or two 
immediately before. With other women, however, 
unions on any day of the month may lead to con- 
ception, but this depends possibly, not only on 
the woman herself but on the vitality and probable 
length of life of the sperm cells of her husband. 
This also varies very greatly in individuals. The 
longest time which the individual sperm has been 
observed to remain vital after entry into the 
woman is seventeen days. I 

Hence it will be realized that a union arranged 
to take place under ideal and perfect conditions, 
perhaps on a holiday into wild and inspiring soli- 
tudes, although it may result in the entry of the 
sperm into the womb of the woman, yet it may not 
lead to the actual fusion of the sperm and egg cell, 

x See Bossi, N. Arch. d'Obstetr. Gynocol, April, 1891. 
15 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

and to the consequent conception until some days 
have passed. 

Strange it is indeed in this world, in which so 
much scientific and laborious observation has been 
devoted to all sorts of irrelevant and trivial sub- 
jects, that knowledge of the actual processes of our 
own fertilization and conception and of the extent 
of the significance to the future generations of the 
mode and condition of the union of the parents, are 
almost totally unknown to scientists or doctors, 
and are disregarded by the majority of the public. 

A recent memoir in the French Academy of 
Science 1 dealing with statistical ' figures (going 
back in Prance, at any rate, so far as 1853) proves 
that there does seem to be a definite seasonal in- 
fluence on the power of conception. Taking the 
births for the whole year, it is found they are not 
equally divided throughout the months, but that a 
notable maximum of births is found in February 
and March for most of the countries in the northern 
hemisphere, the actual maximum of births being 
from the 15th Februarv to the 15th March, and 

1 Charles Richet, "De la Variation mensuelle de la Natalite," 
1916, Comptes rendus Acad. Sciences, Paris, pp. 141-149 and 
161-166. 

16 



CONCEIVED IN BEAUTY 

thus indicating that the maximum of conceptions 
took place between 5th May and the 5th June. 
Richet quotes Bertillon as having established the 
fact that this maximum of conceptions does not 
depend on the chance that brides like to be married 
in the spring, because an identical maximum is 
found in the illegitimate birthrate. Richet gives 
many tables of figures, and maintains that the 
maximum corresponds both in the town and in 
the country, among the rich and the poor, and 
among the married and the unmarried, and is, 
therefore, in his opinion, an actual physiological 
function : 

C'est que les conditions physiologiques de la matura- 
tion de l'ovule et de sa fecondation ne sont pas egale- 
ment favorables dans toutes les periodes de l'annee. 
Par suite d'une ancestrale predisposition, au moment 
du printemps, chez la femme, comme chez la plupart 
des animaux, mais moins nettement que chez eux, la 
maturation, la chute et la fecondation de l'ovule se 
font dans des conditions meilleures et plus assurees. 

The corresponding maximum for the southern 
hemisphere arises between August and October. 
This natural tendency to produce children accord- 
ing to the season is, to some extent, altered by the 

17 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

conscious and deliberate control of parenthood, 
which all the more highly civilized countries now 
find that their better citizens are exerting. 

This natural time for conception will, however, 
tend not to be thwarted by those who are con- 
sciously regulating their lives, because from 
almost every point of view, the summer is the best 
time in which to experience the joys of love. As 
the spring is the best time for a baby to be born, 
the thoughtful mother-to-be will try, other things 
being equal, to arrange that its birth should take 
place in the verdant spring, both for her own sake 
and for that of the child. The weeks of recovery 
after the strain of the birth are more easily and 
happily spent lying in the warm sunshine of a 
spring or summer garden than in the chill of the 
winter months, and even the actual expense of the 
birth is reduced when it takes place in the warmth 
of the spring or early summer, when fires and the 
labour they involve will be saved. 

The child too has warm air to surround it on 
its first introduction to the outer world after its 
long period of warmth and protection within its 
mother, and when in a month or two it is able to 
kick about on the grass, it benefits directly from 

18 



CONCEIVED IN BEAUTY 

the rays of the sun and also from the sun-warmed 
earth. 

Various notable men and women, and, in par- 
ticular, the famous Dr. Trail of America, have held 
that the actual hour of conception is the one of 
fate, and that the moods, feelings, and conditions 
of the parents in that hour work more vital magic 
then than they can do in any succeeding days or 
weeks. Instinctively, one would like to feel that 
this is so. Indeed it will take much to disprove 
it, although it is a theme which it is at present 
impossible to prove, and it must remain always 
only a personal bias, until thousands of people who 
view marriage aright, will consciously observe and 
record many things, and contribute them to some 
thinker who will tabulate, correlate, and understand 
them. 

Whether the hour of conception affects the child 
directly or not, the memory of an ardent and 
wonderful experience, in which the pair of lovers 
consciously surround themselves with beautiful 
conditions, and deliberately place themselves 
through their love at the service of God and 
humanity in the creation of the next generation, 
must give a vitalizing and joyous memory of both 

19 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

throughout all their lives. This memory being 
especially connected with the dear child of that 
union must, therefore, have in this indirect way at 
any rate a positive racial value. 



20 



CHAPTER III 

THE GATEWAY OF PAIN 

As when desire, long darkling, dawns, and first 
The mother looks upon the newborn child, 
Even so my Lady stood at gaze and smiled 
When her soul knew at length the Love it nurs'd. 
Born with her life, creature of poignant thirst 
And exquisite hunger, at her Heart Love lay 
Quickening in darkness, till a voice that day 
Cried on him, and the bonds of birth were burst. 

D. G. Rossetti. 

THE price of every beauty in this world is 
in proportion to its quality, even although 
the payment of the price exacted may be 
long deferred, or may be made in such an intricate 
and remote form that its connection with the 
result is overlooked. 

As the greatest thing which lovers can give 
each other is a child, and as none in the world 
are so great as lovers, the price exacted by Nature 
for the child of loving and sensitive people is 
correspondingly heavy. 

21 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

This statement may apparently conflict with 
the idea that the joy of bearing a child to the 
beloved is a woman's consummation of happi- 
ness ; yet it does not conflict, because of the deeper 
truth that the supremest happiness is mysteriously 
intermingled with self-sacrifice. A young woman 
whose character is sufficiently beautiful and sensi- 
tive to know the highest joys of motherhood — the 
full delights of human existence and love — will also 
be sensitive to the varied pains which motherhood 
will bring. Indeed, in this respect, the poet's saying 
that ' ' the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers 
is always the first to be pricked by the thorn' ' is 
essentially true. 

The radiance of the highest form of motherhood 
is that of the transfigured saint, hallowed by suffer- 
ing comprehended and endured, transmuted into a 
service beyond and above the lower desires of self 

For long, indeed for the many millions of years 
during which she has shown a motherhood com- 
parable with that of human beings'. 1 Nature has 
essentially trapped and tricked the mother into her 

1 By this I mean the motherhood which carries and protects 
the developed young within the mother's body, unlike that of the 
lower animals, such as fishes, which leave the eggs to their fate. 

22 



THE GATEWAY OP PAIN 

motherhood. All the woodland and jungle crea- 
tures, the deer or the tiger, the rabbit or the 
squirrel, grow up through their brief adolescence 
into a partial consciousness of delight in themselves 
and reach the phase of their development in which 
their own desires urge them to unite with each 
other. One can scarcely believe that they are 
conscious of the resulting parenthood, which will 
become a physical fact at a later date, although the 
training of her cubs by a woodland mother un- 
doubtedly does include handing on, through some 
speechless communication, of some actual in- 
struction. A similar blind parenthood, but in 
addition coerced, has for many thousands of years 
been characteristic of a large portion of the human 
race. Even to-day motherhood is too often blind : 
the young girl delighting in herself and the fairness 
of her own body, conscious of the power she wields 
in social life as a beautiful and attractive creature, 
whom older people pet and please, and young men 
place upon a pedestal, is urged by this natural self- 
centred delight into accepting, through flattery, 
the enjoyment of herself by some chosen mate; and 
the later consequences of motherhood are then faced 
either in amazed astonishment or in open revolt. 

23 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

Earlier civilizations often dealt with the exces- 
sive births resulting from blind or coerced parent- 
hood by destroying the children as infants after 
birth. This was done directly, and often by her 
leading citizens, in Greece (one of the highest forms 
of civilization ever attained), and still infanticide 
direct or indirect goes on among all the populous 
races of the world. Where the valuation of the 
mother's mental and physical suffering is low, one 
may still see motherhood, not as a fine, voluntary 
and glorious act of self-sacrifice from the highest 
possible motives of love and service directly to the 
beloved, and indirectly to the race, but as the 
exploitation of a trapped and helpless sacrifice. 

Mothers will say that their babies are their 
greatest joys; one may ask, therefore, how I can 
use the word ' ' sacrifice' ' in connection with mother- 
hood. The use of the word is just, and based on 
truths too generally concealed by those who know 
them, and far too generally unknown by those who 
ought to know them. Ignorance of their extent 
has made men callous, indifferent or ribald towards 
the profound sacrifices of motherhood. 

Few there be, however, who do not know of the 
agonizing torments of actual birth. The Bible is 

24 



THE GATEWAY OF PAIN 

read aloud in churches, and in its wording there is 
some recognition of the existence of this agony, 
although based upon earlier and simpler civiliza- 
tion, in which the women were probably better 
cared for and better fitted for motherhood than the 
majority of women are to-day. Following biblical 
tradition, the memory of the agony of birth is 
generally portrayed as being wiped out by the 
supreme joy in the child which follows. To-day, 
however, this effacement of the anguish is by no 
means universal, and the abiding horror of the 
birth is so great, that not a few women refuse to 
bear another child. Then men, who cannot even 
imagine the experience of child-bearing, denounce 
such a mother, rate her and hold her up to 
derision. How little do they realize that in her 
they may see Nature's working of the laws of 
evolution. s 

The torturing agony of birth might so easily 
have been averted by Nature had the construc- 
tion of our bodies differed but very slightly from 
those which we to-day possess in common with 
most of the higher animals. The human baby 
when the hour comes for it to sever its connection 

" See Chapter XVII. 

25 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

from its mother, and, as an independent individual, 
to venture into the open air of the world, has to 
make its way through the arched gateway of bone 
fixed and set by the mother's own requirements 
as a frame to her own structure. The encircling 
archway of bone through which the infant has to 
pass is but three or four inches in diameter. It 
would have been possible, had our evolution taken a 
different turn, for the infant to have made its exit 
through the soft wall of the mother's body instead 
of through this fixed and hardened circle of her 
bone, but for some causes too remote for us at 
present to discover, this was not so, and the essen- 
tial fact faces us to-day that every infant born 
naturally must be born through this circle of bone. 
Moreover, if the infant is a well-developed and 
healthy one, as the beautiful baby of a healthy 
and beautiful young couple should naturally and 
rightly be, that infant's head is larger in diameter 
than the circle of bone through which it has to 
pass. Its tissues have, therefore, to be squeezed 
and pressed to mould their shape in order to allow 
its exit through the orifice, and this must be a slow 
process, and one which almost always entails great 
pressure and consequent agony to the mother. 

26 



THE GATEWAY OF PAIN 

Dr. Mary Scharlieb says in The Welfare of the 

Expectant Mother : 

It is, however, scarcely possible that either the 
public or the profession realizes that one woman dies 
in child-birth for every 250 children born alive. In 
addition to this we have to remember that the same 
accidents and diseases which kill the mothers and the 
babies, inevitably cause a still heavier percentage of 
crippling and invaliding. 1 

Twenty-five per cent, and more of the babies 
conceived and borne find the journey through the 
bony archway into the outer world so difficult and 
arduous a task that they perish in the process of 
birth, although probably had they been born by 
Cesarean section, they would have survived and 
grown up as healthy children. 

We do not consider what the infant itself in 
birth may be enduring. The infant is unconscious, 
that is to say, it carries no memory of these earlier 
months in its conscious memory as it grows up, 
but the excessive moulding, particularly of its head, 
which often has to take place, and sometimes takes 
weeks to right itself, must, one thinks, greatly 
disturb the little brain, and, in my opinion, may 
have a lifelong effect. 

1 Page 43. 

27 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

I have never heard this aspect of our present 
problem duly considered. The fact that the in- 
creasing brain capacity of civilized man tends ever 
to give the new-born infant a larger head, and tends 
proportionately to increase the size of the head out 
of relation to the size of the circle of its mother's 
bone, has been commented on, and appears to 
some far-seeing thinkers as the possible cause of the 
ultimate extinction of the human race. Because if 
we go on developing in the way we are at present 
doing, ever depending more and more on our brains, 
and the head of the new-born infant tends to 
increase with the natural development of the brain, 
the day will come when the birth of a child is 
absolutely blocked by the relative diameter of its 
head and of its mother's pelvic bones. If the 
higher races maintain a dominant place in the 
world, the day might come when many or nearly all 
women would be in such a position. What scheme 
the race may have devised before that date to 
relieve this cruel deadlock it is not here the place 
to discuss, but the perfecting of the method of birth 
by Cesarean section offers much promise. But 
this possibility, on which to-day we are beginning 
to impinge, indicates to us one of the great causes 

28 



THE GATEWAY OF PAIN 

of the torturing agony of the actual hours of 
birth, which the young mother and father-to-be 
may have to face before they can see the child of 
their love. 

Fortunate women are even still so contructed 
that the circle of bone has a relatively large orifice 
which allows the infant comparatively easily to 
pass through it, and the difficulty and danger of 
birth for them is minimized. With them the birth 
pangs may be so comparatively trivial that, in 
comparison with the result, they are truly "almost 
negligible' ' as most men would like to believe of 
most women. 

Such women, when outward circumstances allow 
it, are those whom every impulse should encourage 
to bq the mothers of the large families, which are, 
under proper conditions, still desirable for a portion 
of our people. 

Such a woman as the one who wrote me the 
following letter, is indeed, the standard which all 
women and would-be mothers would gladly reach 
were it possible in any degree to control the forma- 
tion of a growing girl's body, so that as a woman 
she might retain such a primitive adaptation to 
motherhood : 

29 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

On the exact right day the babe arrived ... in a 
quarter of an hour he was there, without nurse, doctor, 
or any one, and with no pain to myself. This little 
party has grown into a splendid specimen, very large 
(he was 83^ lbs at birth) and firm and muscular. He 
is the whole day long laughing and kicking or sleeping. 

Such women, however, so far as records go, 
are few. Much might be done by science to dis- 
cover what are the causes of the reverse condition, 
and if possible to tend to eliminate them. 

In view of the agony which myriads of women 
throughout the ages of civilization have endured, 
it seems strange indeed that no effort should ap- 
parently have been made by the learned to under- 
stand the causes which control the individual 
formation of the growing structure, with a view 
possibly to securing some such development. In 
recent years, however, a little has been done in the 
recognition of the causes of the converse, that is to 
say, the excessive narrowing of the pelvis to the 
degree where child-birth is not only torment but a 
life and death agony. And it is now well known 
that this condition is associated with mal-nutrition 
and rickets in infancy and early girlhood. 

The little baby girl who has rickety bones 
30 



THE GATEWAY OF PAIN 

(which result from being improperly fed as an 
infant) is, in extreme cases, certain, and in many 
cases very likely, to have such contracted pelvic 
bones that when her turn comes for motherhood, 
the birth of a living child may be impossible by the 
ordinary processes of Nature. Here again, as so 
often is inevitable, in the course of any considera- 
tion of the profound truths of mated existence, we 
impinge upon the treatment of the unsound and the 
diseased. This under-development of the mother's 
pelvic bones is a different problem from that evolu- 
tionary one touched on in the paragraphs above. 
Alas, that it should be true that the great 
majority of city dwellers come into the category 
of the spoilt and the tainted in some respect or 
another. But, with the vision of true health and 
beauty as a standard before our eyes, many might 
escape the incipient weaknesses by consciously pur- 
suing a standard of health, beauty, and normality. 
It is this standard, this ideal picture, which may 
yet be reproduced in the lives of millions, which I 
desire to present in this book, so that in telling 
young parents some of the great facts which are 
ahead of them, I will present only those difficulties 
which are inevitable, and leave to others the hand- 

3i 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

ling of disease. As things are to-day among 
British stock, 1 it is the very exceptional women 
who find birth an entirely easy process of which the 
pain is trivial, and this is due to the bony structure, 
fixed and limited in size, which stands as a gateway 
of pain between the infant and the outer world, 
between the young wife and her motherhood. 

Before the hour of birth is reached, however, 
the young mother-to-be, if she is not instructed 
and not helped by the wisdom of her elders, may 
have already endured much that it will distress 
and dismay her lover and husband to observe, and 
much more which she, being a woman, will endure 
without allowing him to perceive, although she 
may be so frightened that it may be hard indeed 
for her not to cry out in her bewildered pain. 
How much of this distress and pain is essentially 
"natural," how much is the artificial result of our 
mode of living and our ignorance of Nature's laws? 
What are the things which a healthy, finely-built 
young woman mated to a healthy young man must 

1 In this, and in most of the generalizations found in this book, 
I am speaking of things as they are in Great Britain. While, to 
a considerable extent, the same is true of America and the Scan- 
dinavian countries, it must be remembered all through that I am 
speaking of the British, and primarily of our educated classes. 

32 



THE GATEWAY OF PAIN 

endure, those experiences which she cannot escape, 
and those which she may with proper help avoid 
altogether or in part? It is the object of several 
chapters in this book to answer these questions, 
more truthfully and I hope more helpfully than 
they have yet been answered. The things I deal 
with especially, because they will face nearly every 
healthy girl, are in most books ignored. 

My chapters may appear superfluous to those 
who view the long list of books purporting to 
give advice to the young wife and expectant 
mother on how to treat herself and the coming 
child. I have read the majority of those books, 
and I write this one because of their failure to 
touch on the profoundest essentials in a way which 
will truly help the healthy type of young people 
whom I have in mind. The healthy, normal, and 
happy in my mind's vision are the standard of the 
race; those who to-day to some extent foreshadow 
the strength and beauty of bodily and mental 
equipment which will become a commonplace 
when all have risen to their standard, and it is for 
them that I feel it imperative to add this one more 
book to the long list of books advising the young 
mother. 

3 33 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

The majority of the writers on cognate sub- 
jects, like the majority of the minds of those who 
are concerned at all with the problems of the 
young mother are really, though perhaps uncon- 
sciously, studies in disease, pictures of aberrations 
from the normal, accounts or innuendos dealing 
with illness and handicaps, with abnormal condi- 
tions which should never arise, and the knowledge 
of which should not be brought before the sensitive 
mind as if it were a usual and general thing. The 
acquiescence in a low standard of health, the dis- 
cussion of diseased conditions as though they were 
normal, or even as though they were unavoidable, 
are intensive in their result, and harmful to the 
mentality of all who come under their influence. 
The race sickens ever more and more profoundly 
because of such influences. 

We have to-day in our community a new con- 
ception in the Government Department of the 
Ministry of Health, but alas, that Ministry is 
engrossed in the contemplation of disease. In the 
present state of our civilization, this is perhaps 
unavoidable, because there are not enough people 
in the country of standing and experience in scien- 
tific research who have concerned themselves with 

34 



THE GATEWAY OF PAIN 

the problems of the healthy and beautiful, and of 
the needs and requirements in the way of instruc- 
tion, and outward conditions and environment of 
those who by nature are healthy and normal, and 
who desire to remain healthy and normal. Even 
these to-day need the instruction which Nature 
cannot give to those who toil apart from her bosom 
in the cities, where they cannot hear her voice for 
the roaring of the traffic. This is the piteous plight 
of the majority of our citizens to-day, for so many 
live in towns. 

My scientific work deals entirely with bio- 
logical research, which is a seeking for essential 
truths: one great effect which is evident in our 
social life is the power which the specialist may 
have to impress his standard on others. It is, 
therefore, to my mind vital that those who instruct 
the public should present pre-eminently a study of 
health for the healthy. This book will differ from 
that usual literature which deals with the subject 
of the expectant mother. Young husbands would, 
in my opinion, be wise if they were to keep from 
their wife almost all books w r hich are published 
specially for them. A woman, and particularly a 
girl who is about to become a mother, is in many 

35 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

respects psychologically unduly sensitive to im- 
pressions, and the atmosphere which most of the 
11 books of advice' ' create is revolting and full of 
nameless terror. 

Nevertheless, there are physical facts which all 
must face of a type which makes one feel that 
Nature is cruel in her treatment of us. When two 
young, beautiful, and ardently happy beings are 
embarking upon the greatest work for the com- 
munity which they can do, with a desire to create 
further beautiful and happy lives, it seems indeed 
an ironic and wanton mistake that there should be 
distressing physical experiences for both of them 
to endure. But ' ' As gold is tried by the fire, so the 
heart is tried by pain," and if they are given a 
conscious knowledge of what they must face and 
what they may avoid, there will then be a firm 
foundation and a triumphant consummation to the 
visions and ideals of splendour and perfection 
which they can secure unimpaired through the 
trials which they face and conquer. 



36 



CHAPTER IV 

THE YOUNG MOTHER-TO-BE : HER AMAZEMENTS 

But lo ! what wedded souls now hand in hand 
Together tread at last the immortal strand 

With eyes where burning memory lights love home? 
Lo ! how the little outcast hour has turned 
And leaped to them and in their faces yearned — 

"I am your child: O parents, ye have come." 

Rossetti : The House of Life. 

THE intermingling of the physical, the mental, 
and the spiritual is so subtle, intricate, and 
inexplicable that, in describing the states of 
the bride who is about to be a mother, it is difficult 
to know with which first to deal. 

Assuming that the simple physical facts are 
known, there still remain innumerable subtleties 
which may cause heart searching, perhaps to both 
bride and bridegroom. 

It is almost as though the bearing of a child were 
a function so primitive in its origin that it tends, 
to some extent, to dissociate the ordinary coherence 

37 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

of the mother's life, and to result in a weakening of 
the sub-conscious control over her emotions to 
which she had all her life grown accustomed. 
Thus she enters upon a complex state in which 
primitive instincts and feelings may be at variance 
with the conscious thoughts and aspirations of 
highly civilized and sensitive humanity. 

This complexity of her instincts and her con- 
scious feelings may lead the young wife to find 
an apparently inexplicable conflict in her attitude 
towards her husband. Consciously she desires 
ardently, with all that is best in her nature, to 
bear the child of their love. She adores her hus- 
band and is full of tender emotions toward him as 
the coming father, and experiences a form of 
gratitude that he should be the means of fulfilling 
her dreams ; but possibly, at the same time, she may 
be amazed to find in herself an intense and active 
antagonism to his personal presence, an antagonism 
which she has to fight against revealing. She may 
realize that it is utterly at variance with her real 
feelings, and she may know that it would be the 
acme of cruelty to allow him to become aware 
of it, particularly when he is full of deep con- 
cern and love for her, and is doing all that a 

38 



MOTHER-TO-BE: HER AMAZEMENTS 

loving consideration can do for her happiness and 
welfare. 

Such a complex diversity of mental states 
running perhaps coincidently at the same hour 
in the mind of a girl may, if acute, lead to an 
outwardly recognizable form of hysteria and even 
to an unbalanced mind. Of such, however, I am 
not speaking, but am now describing the outwardly 
controllable, but nevertheless inwardly felt, effer- 
vescing conflict of instinctive emotions, which is 
far more frequent than is generally recognized, and 
which the best balanced and most loving women 
are amazed to experience in themselves. 

From women whom I know to be exceptionally 
happy wives and mothers, I have evidence on 
this theme. With, of course, personal variations, 
they tell me that they have never confided this 
bewildering experience to their husbands, their 
doctors, or their relatives, but, in essence, they say 
what is said in the following words by one of my 
correspondents : 

In the first few months of coming mother- 
hood she had a feeling of antagonism so strong 

that it amounted to actual dislike of my husband's 
presence, and a desire to be right away from him. 

39 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

This distressed me very much at first as I thought I 
must be losing my love for my husband, and could not 
understand such a sudden reversal of feeling as I loved 
him very deeply. ... At the end of the first three 
months, I found that my feeling of love returned in 
full strength, and with it a feeling of intense devotion 
and tenderness towards my husband as the father of 
my coming child. 

Some such experience, generally and fortunately 
limited to comparatively short though different 
periods, is not infrequently felt, and is often a 
source of secret distress and anguish to the young 
wife whose sense of loyalty to the man she loves 
and married bars her from the relief of talking of 
these feelings. As is now beginning to be realized, 
emotions deeply experienced which are deliberately 
suppressed, may have far reaching effects even on the 
health. It is, therefore, well that she should know 
what is, I am sure, the truth, that this physical 
repugnance, which sometimes even amounts to a 
detestation of sharing the same house with the hus- 
band, and a desire to escape even from superficial 
contact of eating in the same room with him, is a 
temporary phase, possibly phylogenetic s in its origin. 

1 That is to say, repeating the history of our very early an- 
cestors, where the female probably felt some resentment towards 

40 



MOTHER-TO-BE: HER AMAZEMENTS 

This passing phase, whether it lasts a few days 
or months, is neither necessary nor absolutely 
universal, but so far as I can ascertain it appears 
to be a common occurrence in the lives of the more 
sensitive and tenderly loving of wives. Where the 
coming child has not been desired by both parents, 
and where the mother resents her coming matern- 
ity, this is, of course, a totally different problem, 
for which there is a very obvious reason. I am 
speaking now only of the mother-to-be who deeply 
desires her child, who is physically healthy and 
well formed, living under comfortable, protected, 
and happy conditions, and who ardently loves, and 
is loved, by her husband; it is she who may, and 
most frequently does, feel this passing phase of 
intense physical antagonism. That she loves, and 
consciously loves, gives her an outward control so 
that this under-current of inherent antagonism is 
not allowed to show, and is gallantly concealed 
from the whole world. She would feel it an intense 
disloyalty to speak of it to any living soul ; but it is 
there, and it is so often a source of distress and strain 

the male who had encompassed her maternity, and who most 
certainly would live apart from her and not in the ordinary con- 
tact of a united life. 

41 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

upon the nervous system that it should be open- 
ly faced instead of being, as it now is, a repressed 
feeling. This repression tends to result in one of 
the greatest difficulties of the healthy woman who 
is carrying a child, namely sleeplessness. The 
complex balance of her nervous control is strained 
by her surprise at herself, and perhaps by her self- 
reproaches, and thus she has an unnecessary bur- 
den in addition to the one of the coming child. 
This phase, therefore, is not a fact to be ignored or 
treated too lightly, and while it lasts it should be 
respected so far as is compatible with the circum- 
stances of the two and with due regard for the 
mother. It is not a thing either to fear or to be 
ashamed of. It is perhaps best openly faced as a 
fact of rather curious interest, as an ancient sur- 
vival in oneself of racial history. If possible it 
should form the object of innocently playful 
laughter between the girl and her husband; this 
would do much to prevent its suppression taking 
a serious root. 

Aware of the existence of this phase and its 
probable meaning, and treating it in this simple 
sensible way, neither the young mother nor the 
father-to-be need fear this brief physical antagon- 

42 



MOTHER-TO-BE: HER AMAZEMENTS 

ism. Where its danger lies, however, is in the 
possibility that unrecognized, it will, with those 
who live a shade less perfectly, result in the begin- 
ning of a habit of irritation, and perhaps in the 
setting up of some form of verbal bickering on the 
part of those who cannot lead as secluded and 
separate lives as would be possible in a spacious 
country or in a large establishment. When once 
the pair have broken the sweet custom of speaking 
only in love to each other, then, even after the 
temporary phase of antagonism has passed, they 
may find themselves with a habit of verbal bicker- 
ing which is intensely corrosive, ultimately perhaps 
more than any other thing tending to destroy the 
outward beauty of a mutual life. 

There is another and reverse aspect of the 
mental phases through which a young mother- 
to-be may pass, in which she has an intense and 
added passion for her husband, and, as this leads 
to a subject of great importance, and a subject 
which has never been adequately handled, I will 
defer its consideration to Chapter XII. 



43 



CHAPTER V 

THE YOUNG MOTHER-TO-BE: HER DELIGHTS 

The sweet, soft freshness that blooms on baby's limbs-— does 
anybody know where it was hidden so long? Yes, when the 
mother was a young girl it lay pervading her heart in tender and 
silent mystery of love— the sweet, soft freshness that has bloomed 
on baby's limbs. 

Tagore : Gitanjali. 

IN a happy and desired motherhood, every hour 
of the day and night may bring its intense 
delight, both in the dreams of contemplation, 
wherein the experience of love sinks deep into the 
heart, and in the linking up of the present with the 
future. All natural functions rightly performed 
give a deep satisfaction and content, but this, the 
greatest function of all, now so specialized and 
intimately interwoven with every highest racial 
impulse, and every dearest personal desire of the 
loving pair, yields a wealth and profundity of 
experience surpassing all else. 

In my opinion, undoubtedly the ideal way of 
44 



MOTHER-TO-BE: HER DELIGHTS 

spending the earlier months of coming parenthood 
is in the form of an extended honeymoon, in which 
the couple travelling slowly should follow the guide 
of seasonal beauty, or should visit place after place 
of historic interest or natural charm, so that the 
mother's mind should be fed and stimulated by 
historic memories, by the exquisite freshness of 
nature, and the grandeur of man's artistic achieve- 
ments. This, of course, would not be possible in 
its fullest extent to many, until, in the future, 
society recognizes the supreme importance to the 
race of the expectant mother. Some such course, 
however, might be possible to a larger number than 
it is at present were they to realize not only their 
personal good, but the racial benefit of this pro- 
cedure. In our country, owing to our artificial 
and unclean attitude, the mother-to-be, particu- 
larly during the later months, stays at home so far 
as possible, and does not go from place to place. 
When going about entails battling with crowds on 
public conveyances, this is wise. But the easy 
effort of walking or of riding in the old-fashioned 
horse carriage from place to place on an extended 
journey, is ideal, and sometimes appears to have 
beneficial reactions on the character and quality of 

45 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

the child that is coming. But, even if such a mode 
of life is impossible, yet the mother by reading and 
conversation can, if she has a mind of trained 
imagination, vary and enrich the mental environ- 
ment of her child while it is developing. 

Then, too, the mother-to-be can count among 
her delights all the intimate personal enjoyment 
of the little physical things which contribute to 
the great anticipations of the future. She can, if 
she has the skill herself, sew the little clothes, 
stitching into them sunny thoughts and beautiful 
hopes, making them links between the present 
delightful solitude & deux and another beautiful time 
which the little one who is coming cannot compre- 
hend till, many years hence, he or she may ex- 
perience its charm in turn. 

Little things intensely loved undoubtedly bring 
a greater reward in human happiness than great 
and numerous possessions, the joy of which can be 
but partly grasped. Within a tiny home, a 
mother whose heart vibrates with love can find a 
thousand sources wherewith to enrich the coming 
life. 

But of all her delights, the greatest must always 
be the thought of the wonderful gift, which, at 

46 



MOTHER-TO-BE: HER DELIGHTS 

some ever nearing date, she will be able to give to 
the man whom she adores. Some men are negli- 
gent of the charms and enravishments of children, 
but I think in every man who fully loves, and is 
fully loved by his wife, the thought of the child 
of them both must always be a stimulant to every- 
thing most ardently beautiful and profound in 
their natures. 

Pictures of the child in after life filling brightly 
and beautifully some big position in the world 
may flit past the mother's mind during this time, 
but, if the mother is wise, she will not too inti- 
mately visualize the outward form of her child 
as a maturing girl or boy. By so doing she may 
indirectly wrong it. (See Chapter XIV.) 

Her delight should be to picture a tiny figure 
laughing and dancing, thinly veiled so that its sex 
is hidden; the figure of a child a few years old, 
still full of divine innocence and radiant possibili- 
ties. Happy hours of bodily rest may be spent 
picturing it in a thousand beautiful actions, dancing 
in the sunlight, a contagious centre of joy in the 
whole world around them. On such an idea of 
delight she may lavish every day invigorating 
thoughts and wonderful dreams; none will be 

47 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

wasted, of that she may be assured. If, at the 
same time, she is securing the coming child's bodily 
well-being through the proper material channels, 
then she can feel that these dreams of higher than 
material beauty are being built into reality. The 
secret sacred wonder of the process of which she is 
the active centre casts its spell of magic and delight 
around the willing mother. "A Garden enclosed 
is my Beloved,' ' and she feels within her own exist- 
ence the mystic sense of divine beauty, which one 
feels in another form in a walled garden in the 
summer twilight. 



4« 



CHAPTER VI 

THE YOUNG MOTHER-TO-BE: HER DISTRESSES 

The amount of suffering that has been and is borne by women 
is utterly beyond imagination. 

Herbert Spencer: Principles of Ethics, II. 

THE bodily changes which at first almost 
imperceptibly steal upon the mother, if 
she be a girl who has enjoyed her own 
physical beauty, and has taken that care of her- 
self which so delightful a thing as a young woman's 
body merits, will be at first a series of amazements 
and perhaps of delights as her body rounds itself 
and becomes more perfect. At this time the 
husband should fill his memory with her exquisite- 
ness, for though she will, in the end, return per- 
haps to her normal strength and a re-awakened 
and different beauty, she will never again in her 
life reach such a point of bodily perfection as she 
does during the first three months or so of her 
coming motherhood, culminating at about the 

close of the third month. 
4 49 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

As the years pass, hallowed and sanctified by 
love which is understood, even when grey with age, 
her face may gain an ever increasing beauty and 
power, but the perfection of her body is reached in 
the early days when she is first about to become a 
mother. 

To one who cares for the outward form of her 
body, changes will occur inevitably as the months 
pass, which may give rise to deep distresses, prin- 
cipally because they feel at the time so permanent, 
and it is difficult to believe that the disfigurements 
will ever pass. For a time she must inevitably 
become less and less beautiful; she may indeed 
become, even to herself, repugnant. Perhaps to 
her as to so many thousands of women the sight 
of themselves then is a torment, and the conquest 
of this feeling is a great and increasingly difficult 
mental exercise. As this time approaches and is 
upon her, the young mother-to-be must concen- 
trate all her conscious thought on the beauty of the 
future. She must forget the present and its cruel 
distortions and live in the months and years that 
are to come when she will have with her another 
life and lovely form to which she has given origin. 

Nothing is at present gained for our civilization 
50 



MOTHER-TO-BE: HER DISTRESSES 

by the obstinate blindness on the part of some, and 
the wilful deception on the part of others, which 
together encourage the concealment from the bride 
of what she has to face. 

The result has been that many a woman enters 
upon her motherhood gaily and eagerly, totally 
unprepared for what is to follow, totally unaware 
that, by the first act of motherhood, she gives up 
something essential to herself and something which 
is irreplaceable in all the after years. So great a 
gift should be made not only voluntarily, but 
consciously, and with full knowledge of what it 
entails. 

On the one hand stand these prudes, but on the 
other the too eager and explicit, even lewd and 
profane and soiled minds who delight in lugubrious 
warnings. 

Cruel indeed is the callous hardness of the older 
mind that can see without desiring to help the 
proud and sensitive young spirit embarking upon a 
course which cannot but entail subtle difficulties 
at the best, and extreme physical anguish at the 
worst, yet help of the kind the modern sensitive 
girl needs is almost unobtainable. Rare, indeed, is 
the mother of the last generation who has the 

51 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

power and the knowledge to meet the unvoiced 
demands of this. 

Acquainted as I am with all sorts and conditions 
of men and women, I am still nevertheless fre- 
quently amazed and filled with burning indignation 
at the well-nigh inhuman cruelty, stupidity, and 
hypocrisy of the older generation towards young 
potential parents. It is not an uncommon thing 
to hear a man who is unfaithful to his wife because 
she has lost her physical beauty, at the same time 
haranguing the public on the compulsory duties of 
parenthood on the part of all young married 
women, and coupling his denunciations with 
sneers at the young girl who fears to embark on 
motherhood, reviling her as selfish. Yet the cause 
of her shrinking may be that from all the weltering 
confusion of contradictory and scrappy informa- 
tion which may have been allowed to reach her, 
the one which has fixed itself in her mind most 
vividly, is that which promised her loss of her 
bodily charm, and that of all she possesses is most 
valuable to her as a bond which binds her husband's 
affection to her. I have yet to meet the woman 
who is perfectly sure of the continuance of her 
husband's romantic love who feared the risks of 

52 



MOTHER-TO-BE: HER DISTRESSES 

motherhood. As I said at the beginning of the book, 
all who truly and deeply love, desire parenthood. 

There is indeed a diabolical malignity in the 
older man who is himself unfaithful because of the 
existence of the very things in his wife which he 
denounces the younger girl for fearing. 

This must not be misunderstood by my readers 
as indicating that I think a woman should shrink 
in any way, or that her husband should hesitate 
to give all the fragrance and beauty which they 
possess towards making the child of their love the 
citizen of the future. But with fervent intensity, 
I feel that to keep the young woman ignorant of 
reliable facts, and, at the same time, on the one 
hand to upbraid and bully her, and on the other to 
terrorize her with evil-minded tales and tragic 
sights, is conduct which would be laughable in its 
absurdity if it did not touch the spring of tears. 

As the months of expectant motherhood suc- 
ceed one another, the girl will find her power to 
walk and run, to keep up with her mate in his 
pleasure, his out-door exertions, or even to do the 
usual standing involved in the course of her house- 
work, increasingly curtailed. This is perhaps the 
inevitable consequence of the burden of actual 

53 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

weight which results from the later growth of 
the child within her as it increases and approaches 
the size of a living baby. 

Sometimes the fortunate mother finds that she 
is still capable of the same amount of exertion to 
which she is generally accustomed, but, under 
modern conditions, this is but seldom. The stories 
of Kaffir women on the trek who bear their children 
and follow on with the rest, and savages whose 
activity is in no way curtailed, are neither applic- 
able to modern conditions, nor are they fair stand- 
ards to set, because such women do not live as the 
modern woman is forced to do, nor is their bodily 
organization really comparable with that of our 
highly sensitive brain-evolved race. 

Nevertheless, with the exception of heavy 
exertion, the girl who is carrying her child should 
be able to indulge in a much greater amount of 
healthful exercise, without undue fatigue, than she 
is generally able to enjoy. (See also Chapter X.) 

Most women have heard rumours of others who 
have been able to follow out almost all their usual 
occupations, and have felt little or no handicap 
from child-bearing. Such an exceptional woman 
is my correspondent who wrote : 

54 



MOTHER-TO-BE: HER DISTRESSES 

I lived exactly as usual; I played golf up to the 
middle of the seventh month, and bicycled up to my 
very last. On the afternoon of the day my second 
child was born (weighing 8?4 lbs.) I was shopping with 
a woman acquaintance, who had no idea there was 
anything on the way. 

Such women, although not very many, do exist 
among us. Their existence is perhaps the source 
of the hope which always animates every girl first 
embarking on her parenthood that she, by the sheer 
force of the longing for health which is within her, 
will prove also to be such an exception. Some- 
times this desire may apparently be fulfilled, but 
generally, unless it is coupled with much greater 
knowledge than the girl possesses, as the months 
pass one by one, her proud spirit will bend, she 
will give up and give up and give up. Humbled, 
weakened, humiliated before herself, through the 
fact that she is not strong enough to fight what 
she now is inclined acquiescently to call "Nature," 
she too goes down the stream with all the myriads 
of other happy- hearted girls, whose gallant en- 
deavours have equally failed. Then she creeps, 
wearily resting by the way, where she had hoped 
to tread with a firm and lightsome step. 

55 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

There grows in her mind, and this is stronger 
the more she loves her husband, the added distress 
that she feels that she is failing him. He married 
a mate, an equal, who lighter of step could yet 
cover the ground as well as he, and who could share 
his amusements, his work to some extent perhaps, 
and his pleasures. She feels that she must, so far 
as she possibly can, maintain this position. This 
impels her, particuarly if they have been married 
but a short time, and hence their days of delightful 
untrammelled companionship have been so few. 

In this unselfish distress, which is primarily for 
him, she is tempted to conceal her effort, and tends 
to overstrain herself in an endeavour to act as 
completely as she can the part, as reported, of the 
early Greek or Roman matron, or of the proud and 
savage mother who could bear her children as 
light as a woodland creature. Finding sooner or 
later that she cannot do so, she suddenly gives in. 
Her strength, undermined by the series of distresses, 
the subtle shocks and blows to which she is secretly 
subjected, she yields and takes on that air of semi- 
invalidism, which demands constant care and 
consideration from her husband and those about 
her, which in a way represents the hauling down of 

56 



MOTHER-TO-BE: HER DISTRESSES 

her gallant flag. Her dreams of an easy mother- 
hood are vanquished. 

She will at times be dimly conscious that she 
is no longer able so acutely to feel. This, in a 
way perhaps, is Nature's provision against the 
too intense experiencing of emotion, which would 
otherwise come with sensitive motherhood. The 
sensation can be described, as one woman put 
it, as though each one of her powers of feeling 
were wrapped round in cotton wool, deadened and 
clogged so that they no longer gave contact. This 
may be well, but it adds in a dim way to the sense 
of distresses, a sense of unreality and apartness, 
which, if it coincides with that temporary anti- 
pathy to her husband, which was noted previously, 
may make the mother-to-be, for the time being at 
any rate, indeed a wanderer in the valley of the 
shadow. 



57 



CHAPTER VII 

THE YOUNG FATHER-TO-BE : HIS AMAZEMENTS 

Till from some wonder of new woods and streams 
He woke, and wondered more; for there she lay. 

D. G. Rossetti. 

THE young father-to-be, though a real and 
very important person, has been curiously 
neglected by all and sundry who concern 
themselves with the affairs of the "expectant 
mother," "child welfare," and the other social and 
semi-eugenic matters about which well-meaning 
people have so voluminously written and so sedul- 
ously talked. 

Sometimes jesting reference is made to the 
rather strange fact that, in some savage races, 
it is the father and not the mother who lies in 
bed for weeks after the birth of the child; but 
of the material and very real psychological expe- 
riences and physical difficulties which the young 
father is encountering and living through during 

58 



FATHER-TO-BE: HIS AMAZEMENTS 

the months before the advent of his first-born, few 
have any knowledge. Fewer still have offered the 
father-to-be any sympathy or help. Nevertheless 
with the increasingly perceptive and specialized 
individuals comprising our civilization, there arises 
an increasing number of young men capable of 
feeling and suffering in some degree corresponding 
to the great realities of which for each his home is 
the centre. And, moreover too, it must not be 
forgotten that among our thoughtful classes are 
now growing up a large proportion of young men 
whose mothers were among the pioneers of 
women's emancipation, whose mothers, therefore, 
were voluntary mothers who have trained their 
sons consciously and unconsciously, directly and 
indirectly, to be more in harmony with the true 
and natural attitude of a sensitive human being 
to its mate than are the average gross and over- 
bearing males, sons of enslaved and involuntary 
mothers. The sensitiveness of the modern young 
man towards his duties as a father, towards his 
wife as the mother of his child is, in my experience, 
very remarkable in its extent and its beauty. I 
have direct and indirect evidence from thousands 
that among the young Army men in various messes 

59 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

on the continent in recent years, an unexpected 
racial seriousness of attitude was shown when the 
necessary key that unlocked the secret chamber 
was available. We know as a most deplorable 
truth, that there has been an increase in the racial 
diseases and an apparent levity towards the duty 
of a man towards a woman. This is less an inher- 
ent baseness on the part of the young man than the 
result of the existence of the false conditions in 
which they have been placed, and to the crimi- 
nal mishandling the whole racial problem has 
received from those older and in a position of 
authority. 

In the nature of things, at first the young man 
can scarcely avoid taking fatherhood much more 
lightly than the girl takes motherhood. In 
normal, sweet, and healthy men, a desire for 
children of their own is very strong. Yet, how- 
ever sympathetic their dispositions, however 
observant they may be of others, the unmarried 
young man cannot, under present conditions, have 
a full comprehension of what the attainment of 
motherhood involves in sacrifice for the mother. 
Hence the ideally mated young couple embarking 
upon parenthood set about it gaily, but before 

60 



FATHER-TO-BE: HIS AMAZEMENTS 

many months have passed, the young father-to-be 
must also be filled with amazements. For, con- 
trol her impulse to be alone as she may (see Chap- 
ter IV), curb her induced fretfulness as she may, 
the general psychological attraction between the 
man and the woman must be affected by the physio- 
logical state of the mother. The young man 
should find himself, if not actually repelled as the 
months progress, at least much more able to give 
his wife an impersonal tenderness rather than ac- 
tive desire for physical union, than he would have 
imagined possible. However sweet their love, if 
they are average human beings and not exceptional, 
he will perhaps, from time to time, be amazed and 
pained by unexpected peevishness and fretfulness, 
perhaps by what appear to be quite irrational and 
unjustifiable complaints from his wife. He should 
be made acquainted with the facts on page 38, 
and should apply them to himself and his wife. 
Knowing of the liability of such a temporary de- 
velopment, he can guard against any permanent 
injuries to love arising from the experience, such 
as often do result when it is unexpected and 
misunderstood. 

I remember once being told by a nurse who had 
61 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

been at a large maternity home that of those who 
came there for the birth of their child, she had only 
seen one couple between whom there was no bicker- 
ing, not even infinitesimal criticisms and gusts of 
temper to ruffle the surface of their intense and 
romantic devotion. "Generally the women at 
this time/' she said, "lead their husbands an awful 
dance, and are always snapping at them, but they 
do not really mean it, of course.' ' 

Men, on the, whole, I think (although it is 
difficult and dangerous to generalize) are less 
tolerant of "superficial snappiness" than women, 
and the ruffling of the surface which comes with a 
few angry words enters probably deeper into the 
life of a sensitive man than it does in the life of a 
girl of corresponding type, although, on the other 
hand, a man may very quickly acclimatize himself 
to ignoring such comparative trivialities. Yet at 
first, at any rate, they not only amaze but distress, 
and when they appear irrational and swiftly pass, 
they may, although a trifle in themselves, be the 
cause of much misunderstanding, and may be the 
foundation of more serious later disharmonies. 

To the man who has any biological knowledge, 
all the wonderful processes of the growth of the 

62 



FATHER-TO-BE: HIS AMAZEMENTS 

unseen embryo, leading up to birth, are full of 
amazed wonder. If a man knows, as all should 
these days (see my book, Married Love, for in- 
formation about the fundamental processes of 
mating) how minute is the single sperm cell from 
which his growing child takes its rise, the immens- 
ity of the results of the activity of that tiny cell 
appear indeed stupendous. His flower-like bride 
is changed, her whole body is permeated, altered 
and impressed by the activities of this particle of 
himself within her. 

Only for the utterly callous can the experience 
of the months of waiting be anything but full of 
continual reminders of the amazing complexity 
of life. Long ago Tennyson felt : 

Flower in the crannied wall, 

I pluck you out of the crannies, 

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower — but if I could understand 

What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

I should know what God and man is. 

Even more filled with humble and profound 
amazement must be the future father, who feels 
that his wife is now the very centre of the greatest 

63 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

mystery and wonder of the universe. Looking at 
her, brooding in her dreams, his mind must be 
continually filled with the consciousness of the 
eager active growth that is in progress, and the 
intense desire to take part in the mystical processes. 



64 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE YOUNG FATHER-TO-BE! HIS DELIGHTS 

A Garden enclosed is my spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain 
sealed. 

Song of Solomon. 

IT is said that men naturally have a more casual 
interest in fatherhood than women have in 
motherhood. It is sometimes even definitely 
said that men do not have a passion for fatherhood 
or care profoundly for young children. This is not 
my experience. A much larger number of men 
than are credited with it feel an intense desire for 
fatherhood, and take a great delight in young 
children. Though, of course, it must always be 
true that their share is a large proportion of the 
pleasure of the little child, while to the mother 
comes a larger proportion of the burden and the 
difficulties. To the child itself, too, the father is 
often more precious than the mother. An acci- 
dental testimony to this effect was given by the 
5 65 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

little daughter of one of those "devoted wives and 
mothers" who thought woman's place was only the 
home, and a mother's duty only to care for her 
children. The child and I were chatting, and the 
little one misunderstood something I said, and 
thought that I asked which of its parents it loved 
most. The child quickly answered, "Oh, I like 
father best, of course — mother is there every day 
and she washes us." The privilege of being a 
child's favourite is no small one, and, as this 
child shows us, a father may win it with unfair 
facility. 

The conscious desire for parenthood, a parent- 
hood which shall give the children the best possible 
chance in life undoubtedly lies behind the majority 
of marriages, so that the young man who has 
married with the desire, perhaps not for immediate, 
but for ultimate fatherhood, when he first learns 
the definite fact that he has already inaugurated 
the beginnings of his child's development must' 
experience an intense and unique wave of feeling, 
which, as in the early days of marriage, with all its 
freshness, and with the actual physical difficulties 
yet unfaced, must be one primarily of buoyant 
delight. 

66 



FATHER-TO-BE: HIS DELIGHTS 

There is also in the earlier months, for the man of 
artistic perceptions, a unique experience in the 
appreciation of his wife's enhanced beauty. It is 
perhaps known that the most critical artistic view 
of woman claims the highest point of perfection 
in her form about the third month of her first peri- 
od of motherhood. To a pair of lovers who have 
delighted in their bodily beauty, as all natural and 
healthy and well-formed young people should do, 
this period, when the loveliness of the woman is at 
its very height, and when the man can feel that he 
has contributed to its perfection, must be a time 
of very special entrancement. That it is some- 
thing from within his most sacred being that has 
added this glow and radiance in perfecting the 
rounded form of the body that he adored in its 
virginal grace, must give a man with artistic and 
poetic potentialities an all too brief but never to be 
forgotten experience. The young father- to-be 
should not lose a day of these swiftly passing weeks, 
for this phase, like all human developments, but 
even more intensely so than most, is passing and 
transient, only to be immortalized in the perman- 
ence of a perceptive memory. 

When, as is inevitable, it has passed, and it is 
67 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

followed within another month or two so acutely, 
even perhaps so agonizingly by its reverse, the cruci- 
fixion of the mother's sensitive feelings which is 
entailed should be hallowed and elevated in both 
their minds by that deeper, less personal, and more 
profoundly racial delight, the picturing with each 
other of the radiance, the strength, the power, the 
purpose, and passion of the life which they are 
creating. So tragically soon after the days when 
he has feasted his eyes and filled his memory with 
her beauty, she will, she must, withdraw her body 
from him and for months to come he will be shut 
out entirely from all sight of her. The reward 
will be an inner experience of the mind. 

A day will come when, for the first time, the 
father-to-be may lay his hand upon his wife 
below her waist and feel the sturdy little kicks of 
his future son or daughter, and can know that, 
though hidden from him, still there is beside him a 
vital and independent being whom he has wakened 
to life. The presence of this little creature whom 
he has not seen colours and permeates every hour 
of their joint existence. 

When the later months pass, the father-to-be 
will have lost one of his most exquisite memories 

68 



FATHER-TO-BE: HIS DELIGHTS 

if he has not already talked and laughed with his 
future child, and if he and his wife and child to- 
gether have not united in that most mystical union 
possible to human flesh. 



69 



CHAPTER IX 

THE YOUNG FATHER-TO-BE I HIS DISTRESSES 

When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door 
is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss 
of the touch of the one on the play of the many. 

Tagore : Gitanjali. 

WITH all the passion for children, with the 
protective chivalrous feeling towards his 
wife which a well-born and well-knit 
man instinctively feels, through all the joy of 
fatherhood that is coming, and the delight in its 
accomplishment, there must run a thread of in- 
tense distress at his own helplessness to help. 
With every consideration that the most resourceful 
man can think of towards his wife, with every 
tender, helpful, encouraging, supporting thing 
that he can do, how little is his share during all 
these months in the burden of the coming parent- 
hood. If, through sympathy, he feels each pang 
his wife may feel; if through sympathy, he curtails 

70 



FATHER-TO-BE: HIS DISTRESSES 

his activity to rest with her, nevertheless it is a 
voluntary abnegation, and if it became intolerable 
at any moment he could escape ; he could run over 
the hills; he could go for a day's fierce solitude and 
activity wherever his feet desired to lead him ; but 
he knows that his wife cannot, that she is chained; 
that not for a moment of the day or night for nine 
months can she lay down the burden for a brief rest 
— that there is no exit for her from this imprison- 
ment of so many of her potentialities but through 
the gateway of agonizing pain. 

The instinct behind marriage is often a feeling 
of chivalrous devotion towards a tender and con- 
fiding girl, and the desire to give her every protec- 
tion. The man finds, however, that his act has 
placed the one whom he desired to protect in such 
a position that she must bear the greatest burden 
possible for a human being to bear, and must bear 
it alone. This must be a deep distress to an 
imaginative man of integrity, although the dis- 
tress be mingled with other and joyous feelings. 
To pretend that it is not so, to say that the joy of 
coming parenthood should and does wipe out all 
such undercurrents of thought is merely to be 
callous or silly. To repress an intense feeling, to 

7i 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

pretend that it is not there, may give an apparent 
surface bravery or brightness. But such repres- 
sion is ultimately destructive to the consciousness 
and whole physique of the one who, thus gallantly 
to himself, endeavours to deny the truth, and is 
often apt to lead to deeper disorders. The mod- 
ern school of psycho-analysts who endeavour to 
set right the effects of mental strain often discover 
that throughout life, perhaps dating from child- 
hood, a personality has been handicapped and 
weakened by some deep suppression of an intensely 
experienced emotion. 

In my opinion, the pretence that a sensitive 
man does not feel, and does not endeavour to 
conceal his feeling about his relation to his wife, 
particularly at the time of their first coming parent- 
hood is to dishonour man's capacity and his 
imagination by the pretence that he does not ex- 
perience what to me it appears all but a brute 
must feel. It impoverishes our life of emotional 
expression, and it tends to injure the man himself, 
to increase the strain by the pretence that the 
strain is not there. I know, for instance, one 
man who fainted at the time his wife gave birth 
to their child, and who, under no consideration, 

72 



FATHER-TO-BE: HIS DISTRESSES 

would allow her to have a second child, although 
he had intensely desired and looked forward to the 
fatherhood of a large family before he knew the 
actual physical experiences which it entailed. 
Such a man, in my opinion, was a good father 
wasted by an excess of emotion made all the more 
intensely destructive to himself by the endeavour 
to maintain the totally artificial and indeed the 
crude attitude which is supposed to be that 
"correct" for a man, namely a sort of dissociation 
of himself from his wife's experiences, and a hard- 
ened lack of recognition of all that is involved. 
It is surely better to recognize that there is that 
intense and poignant sense of helplessness; that 
the sensitive and evolved young man should and 
does feel it, but that it should be recognized as the 
compensating price which he pays for fatherhood. 
As experience in many other regions of human 
activity teaches us, one values a thing very much 
in proportion to the price one pays for it. 

If we are ever to raise our race to the point when 
every child is so precious that no child can be 
hungry, neglected, or unwanted, the conscious 
price which the father pays for his children will be 
one of the assets in valuing the children of the 

73 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

nation. It is, therefore, better to acknowledge and 
encourage such sensitiveness in the father by allow- 
ing the open and honourable expression of such 
feeling, and thus to avoid that almost neurotic and 
destructive effect of the suppression of such intense 
feeling as warped the father mentioned above. 
Because, if the wife avails herself of the advice I 
give in this book, and if the time for parenthood is 
chosen rightly and wisely in relation to her general 
health, and it is ascertained before she embarks 
upon potential motherhood that her bodily and 
bony structure is fit for motherhood, then although 
the experiences of both will be difficult and pro- 
found in their testing of the quality of each other, 
yet motherhood should not result in any excessive 
strain, and should indeed be a time of wonderful 
life activity. 

With all needless ill health, and wanton ugliness, 
and wasteful distress which, at present, are arti- 
ficially involved in it, once swept away, potential 
motherhood should not be an unendurable burden ; 
and though the father's feelings should be intense 
and poignant on behalf of his wife, and though she 
may go through searching experiences, yet the 
gladness should so preponderatingly weigh in the 

74 



FATHER-TO-BE: HIS DISTRESSES 

balance in excess of the troubles and difficulties, 
that no normally healthy and well-endowed young 
couple should ever suffer so much that they dare 
not face a second maternity, as happens, alas, only 
too often to-day. 

On quite a lower plane, but nevertheless on the 
one so essential that it greatly affects all the rest 
of life, is the too frequent distress of the young 
father-to-be about the more material provision of 
all that is necessary for his wife. In counting the 
cost of the coming parenthood, too often quite 
heavy expenses are unforeseen, and, with a fixed 
income, the young man may have the intense 
distress of being unable to provide all that his wife 
not only wishes, but really ought to have. The 
year 191 9, for instance, was a time of extraordinary 
difficulty for all women who bore children, and 
who had a naturally healthy and proper desire to 
eat fruit. With oranges at a shilling each, as they 
were in the winter of 191 8-1 9, how could an ordin- 
ary young couple afford a glassful of orange juice 
a day, which I recommend as profoundly valuable? 
It was obviously impossible. Such a time, of 
course, one hopes will never be repeated. It was 
a period of undue strain, when none, considering 

75 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

the future of the race, should have borne a child 
unless private reasons made it specially advisable. 

But, apart from such excessive and unprece- 
dented difficulties, there are, and probably always 
will be difficulties for the young man who desires 
to provide everything that can benefit his wife. 
Not long ago in the newspapers, a budget of the 
cost of the baby in an ordinary lower middle class 
home was given, and there was an item: " Den- 
tist's bill for the mother, twenty pounds.' ' A 
wise comment was made on this that, alas, it is by 
no means an unusual, indeed it is a usual experience 
that the coming child adversely affects the moth- 
er's teeth, and both for the health of the baby and 
the mother they should be attended to. Possibly, 
even her very life may depend on her teeth being 
thoroughly free from decay after the birth. A 
heavy dentist's bill is too often an unexpected 
anxiety to the young husband, so that this is 
neglected, and the neglected teeth either weaken, 
or may actually result in the death of the mother 
from internal poisoning starting from their decay, 
to which she is peculiarly liable after bearing a 
child. 

Then too, there are unexpected and heavy 
76 



FATHER-TO-BE: HIS DISTRESSES 

expenses which are unforeseen through a variety 
of circumstances, such, for instance, as the uncer- 
tainty of the date of the birth. Those who go to 
nursing homes, as many are now doing owing to 
housing and service difficulties, experience this 
trial more acutely than others. They expect and 
plan, perhaps, for the birth within a given week, 
and the baby may delay two or three or even more 
weeks beyond the calculated time. Young couples 
scarcely able to afford the heavy expenses of a good 
nursing home, who yet had saved sufficient to 
allow the wife three weeks there, may have their 
whole plans dislocated by a delay of three weeks in 
the infant's appearance, resulting in the mother's 
having to remain unexpectedly double the length 
of time for which they had saved the money for 
the nursing home. The young father is then faced 
by the sordid difficulty of finding the necessary 
money, and, unless he is gifted in such a way as to 
make extra earning a possibility, is under a con- 
dition of strain. Just when all his free energy and 
time should be devoted to companionship with his 
wife and infant, he has to spend extra hours work- 
ing at high pressure in order to meet unexpected 
expenses. The young father-to-be who wishes to 

77 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

maintain the right and beautiful atmosphere 
around his coming child, should inform himself of 
all certain and likely contingencies of expense, 
and should make due provision for these before the 
great act of calling forth into being one for whom 
he is primarily responsible. 

To a healthy man, also, there may be a period 
of chastening experience in sharing daily life with 
one who is out of health. Though the prospective 
mother ought not to be in any way invalided, yet 
alas, as things are, too often she is, and only an 
unselfish man will fail to notice the personal 
sacrifice which he endures as a result. 

There is a certain self-centred type of man, who 
may, with the most model intentions, and in order 
to lead a self-respecting life, marry, and who may 
find the resulting pregnancy of his wife very dis- 
concerting to himself and very thwarting to his own 
requirements. With a certain bitter selfishness, 
his attitude was unconsciously expressed by one of 
my correspondents in the following words : ' ' Some- 
thing must be done to prevent any more children ; 
imagine what a wretched time I have with my wife 
sick every day for nine months.' ' Perhaps the 
reader can scarcely restrain a smile at so callously 

78 



FATHER-TO-BE: HIS DISTRESSES 

self-centred an attitude on the part of a husband, 
but, nevertheless, that man does have a real and 
difficult physical problem before him. One way, 
of course, in which to help such a man would be 
to place such help and knowledge before his wife 
that her motherhood should be a more normal one, 
and not so terrible an experience for her. 



79 



CHAPTER X 

PHYSICAL DIFFICULTIES OF THE EXPECTANT MOTHER 

We cannot reason with our cells, for they know so much more 
than we do that they cannot understand us; but though we cannot 
reason with them, we can find out what they have been most 
accustomed to, and what therefore they are most likely to expect; 
and we can see that they get this, as far as it is in our power to give 
it them, and may then generally leave the rest to them. 

Samuel Butler. 

TO far too many women, the time when they 
are carrying a child is a period of strain 
and semi-invalidism ; a time filled not only 
with surprises and difficulties, but too often 
coloured with actual distress and ill-health. This 
should not be. The time of prospective motherhood 
should be one of buoyancy, health, physical activity, 
and mental vitality. The low standard of health 
which the modern woman tolerates is deplorable. 
But to whom can the young mother-to-be turn 
for advice &nd assistance? Such healthy, happy, 
prospective motherhood does not come by instinct 

80 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

in our city life. Those around her, older than she, 
who have had children of their own, may perhaps 
be able to give her a hint here and a little piece of 
advice there, which to some extent alleviates her 
difficulty, or pierces with a faint shadow of light 
the gloom of perplexity in the ever deepening un- 
known into which she is entering for the first time ; 
but nearly all such women have themselves gone, 
blindly and individually, through this period of 
immense significance and mystery without having 
had any rational help from one devoted to the 
maintenance of health. 

Almost every book written to advise the coming 
mother is written by a doctor of disease, with very 
few exceptions by doctors who tolerate what is, in 
my opinion, a disgracefully low standard of general 
health in women. A distinguished gynecologist 
who, in cross-examination before a commission, 
persisted in maintaining that the " daily morning 
sickness'' which is so prevalent in women who are 
carrying a child is "physiologically right and na- 
tural" (indeed, he implied almost that it was neces- 
sary), represents an attitude of mind very general, 
and capable of far-reaching hypnotic injury to the 
community as a whole. 
6 81 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

By far the best and sanest book available for 
healthy women is Tokology, by Dr. Alice Stock- 
ham, but this book has its inaccuracies and its 
drawbacks, and even its pages are too much occu- 
pied with the wretched and handicapping troubles 
which women do experience in large numbers, but 
which should not be. 

Nevertheless, to allow a young girl or woman 
to enter upon these months of trial without making 
clear to her what she has to face is cruel indeed. 
For a sensitive woman the experience is, even at its 
best, and when most free from incapacities, yet 
incredibly and penetratingly more terrible than 
she anticipated. The more sensitive and more 
conscious she is, the deeper and profounder may 
be her joy in her coming motherhood, but, at the 
same time, the more intense the physical experi- 
ences through which she must pass. 

The modern sensitive young woman does not 
take things blindly and patiently and with resigna- 
tion, with a pious belief in her own inferiority, 
which may have helped to dull and moderate the 
experiences of her grandmothers. The more 
evolved she is, the more she may be willing to bow 
to natural law, but the less is she content to suffer 

82 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

wanton cruelties imposed upon her by ignorance, 
stupidity, or coercion. 

Many are the midwives, maternity nurses, and 
medical practitioners with whom I have discussed 
such matters, and from whom, often incognito, I 
have asked advice. I may say that none gave all 
the necessary advice; not one gave one-tenth of 
what is in this book; only one or two gave any 
necessary simple advice in the necessary sympa- 
thetic and understanding fashion, and only one or 
two appeared to have any clear generalizations 
or scientific understanding of the facts about which 
I spoke. The resignation, the shrugging of the 
shoulders in the face of things which would otherwise 
make one weep, or the cheerful braving out or pre- 
tending that things are not as bad as they are, which 
is the general attitude of mind of the maternity nurse, 
is little more helpful than that of the practitioner. 
Concerning many of the practical* facts of the later 
months of pregnancy and actual birth, and the suc- 
ceeding weeks of recovery, the properly trained mid- 
wife seems, on the whole, wiser than the average 
general practitioner, wiser even than the specialist 
who may come at a crisis, but who does not watch 
his patient through the succeeding weeks. 

83 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

Many young women who have recently been 
mothers, have told me of the mental and physical 
horror which they have experienced, and of the 
added horror that they should feel horror, and 
have asked me to generalize, if it is possible, from 
their cases in such a way as to help others who 
enter upon maternity's difficulties for the first 
time, so that they may at least be spared that 
terrible sense of isolation and of exceptional failure 
when they experience, one by one, the things which 
are inevitable, or the things which are, by our 
artificial lives so frequently imposed. 

The bearing of a child very often may be com- 
plicated by actual disease, and then requires, of 
course, expert medical attention. With those 
who are in any sense actually ill, and who should 
be in the hands of a doctor, I am not here dealing ; 
for, in this respect, as throughout my other books, 
I desire only to write of health for the healthy so 
that they may have sufficient knowledge to main- 
tain their health. 

I may say here that, even for the healthiest, 
it is very advisable, not only for her first, but for 
every succeeding pregnancy, that a woman should 
be examined and measured by some wise and 

84 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

healthy-minded medical practitioner or midwife 
at least once during the first three months, and 
twice again during the last three months, but that, 
for the first baby, it would be better to go at least 
every month for examination. In that way, the 
various insidious disturbances of the excretory 
system, and other fundamental things which may 
go a little wrong, even in an otherwise healthy 
woman, can be detected immediately, and dealt 
with. Many, however, find a great difficulty in 
bringing themselves to do this. 

Undoubtedly, it is much better for the prospec- 
tive mother to go to a specialist, old enough to be 
wise and experienced and mellow, and yet young 
and virile and active enough to be acquainted with 
modern knowledge, and healthy and clean enough 
to look for and to desire health and normality in 
those who come for advice. 

This should pre-eminently be the special field for 
women doctors, but there is not nearly a sufficient 
body of them with the necessary qualifications to 
meet the requirements of the community, and I 
should like to see a new profession created for 
women who, with the experience and training of 
first-class midwives, have added to that a sufficient 

85 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

training in general medicine to be specialized to 
advise the healthy prospective mother, and to be 
able to detect at once anything which should 
necessitate handing her on to the doctor of disease. 
Such practitioners should rank in status somewhere 
between the cultivated midwife of gentle birth 
(such as a Queen Charlotte's Hospital nurse) and 
the medical woman. Thus the prospective mother 
would be spared that hard and bitter contact with 
one who has become myopic in the observation of 
disease, and would be able to go to someone spec- 
ially trained to encourage health. Meanwhile, as 
this is but a bright picture of what may come in the 
future (but what will come if women make a 
sufficient demand for it), it may spare many women 
distress if I set out the physical difficulties and 
possibilities which are most liable to occur with a 
healthy woman. These I am trying now to disen- 
tangle into three groups : 

(i) Those nature-imposed; these are essential; 
they cannot be avoided by the healthiest woman. 
They can be perhaps, to some extent, miti- 
gated. They are things which the coming mother 
must be helped through and over; she cannot be 
saved from them. 

86 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

(2) Those entirely artificial; these are quite 
needless, and are the results of either ignorance 
or our gross disregard of known facts, and can be 
entirely eradicated. 

(3) Those which are to-day very usual, but 
which knowledge and a better mode of life may 
conquer. 

Now to consider first the third group: those 
which are general, but which a knowledge could or 
should conquer. 

One of the first signs that she is to become a 
mother, and one of the most usual experiences of a 
young woman when this time begins, is the daily 
recurrence of that penetrating nausea and sickness, 
usually after she has risen in the morning, called 
"Morning Sickness.' ' This is so usual that med- 
ical practitioners rely on it to some extent as a sign 
of pregnancy. It is described in almost every book 
for the prospective mother, and, as I have men- 
tioned, it is sometimes even maintained by distin- 
guished gynecologists as a physiological function, 
i.e., a normal function. 

Now this is a very nauseating and wretched 
experience to the majority of women, and it is one 
which, I maintain, is entirely imposed by ignor- 

87 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

ance, wrong living, and the general hypnotic effect 
of others' perverted views on the woman's system. 
In those women whose internal organs are impro- 
perly placed or somewhat malformed, it occurs as a 
physiological result of pressure or other disturb- 
ance. In true health there is no physiological reason 
whatever for the morning sickness, and a woman who 
lives as she should live during the time of her 
coming motherhood need not experience it. This 
should, in the next generation, be entirely con- 
quered, because it is in a very large extent caused 
by allowing, even forcing, girls when they are still 
unformed and developing to wear corsets. Those 
women who have never worn corsets in the whole 
of their lives, and who dress as they should dress, 
and do as they should do during the months when 
they are becoming mothers, seldom experience 
morning sickness. Though there are some who, 
when they know the child is coming, too late dis- 
card their corsets, and these may still experience 
this unpleasant feature. The extraordinary adapt- 
ability and vitality in a woman's system, however, 
is a remarkable thing, and even those who begin 
later in life than they should to train for mother- 
hood may yet accomplish much. 

88 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

Granted a healthy, well-formed body, a previous 
life of normal activity, sensible attention to the 
following points will insure complete freedom from 
morning sickness in all but the exceptional and 
pre-disposed : 

(a) Discard every scrap of heavy or constricting 
clothing, wearing only the lightest garments hung from 
the shoulder entirely. 

As I said in Married Love, the standard of dress- 
ing for the prospective mother, whose garments 
should be of the lightest wool and silk, if possible, 
should be such that a butterfly can walk the length 
of her body without tearing its wings. 

(6) Discard all rich, heavy and over-cooked foods, 
such as pastries and hot cakes, dried peas and beans, 
rich game or highly seasoned dishes, and she should 
live as much as possible on uncooked foods and simple 
milk puddings, stewed fruit, lightly cooked meat and 
fish, with the largest obtainable quantity of very fresh 
ripe fruit. 

(c) Start the day not with tea, but with the juice of 
two or three oranges squeezed into a tumbler. 

If she does these things she may go through, 
as many women have gone through, the whole 

89 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

nine months without experiencing one single 
moment of nausea. 

A retardation of the action of the bowels or 
constipation is very frequent, and is a cause of 
many other ill-effects. A right diet such as I 
advise, adding particularly honey and brow r n 
bread, does much to prevent it; if it exists in spite 
of this, take suitable bending exercises, even a 
warm hydrostatic douche (using a douche can with 
a little common salt in the water), but do not 
take regular drugs or "aperients." 

Another of the very frequent experiences of the 
mother who is carrying a child, particularly to- 
wards the later months, is the enlargement of the 
veins of the legs and ankles, and the formation of 
varicose veins. These may become very serious 
if neglected, and even may become very serious 
if the woman is being doctored, if, at the same time, 
she does not follow the proper healthy method of 
dieting and living. In addition to the dieting and 
clothing described above, which will make it 
almost certain that she is free from varicose veins, 
she should take warm comfortable sitz baths every 
evening, and she should lie down for at least half 
an hour or an hour in the middle of the day or 

90 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

early evening, with her feet raised a few inches 
above the level of her head. 

One of the most serious difficulties, felt even 
by those who avoid all other drawbacks, is sleep- 
lessness, particularly in the last month or two when 
the activities of the child may be very disturbing. 
In this, much depends on the position in which the 
child is lying, and sometimes the position of the 
child can be improved by massage and manipula- 
tion by a trained midwife or doctor. Something 
also can be done by the mother herself through her 
mental attitude and hand touch on the child, and 
also by taking hot sitz baths nightly before going 
to bed. Still more, however, is accomplished by 
right diet, clothes, exercise, and happiness (see 
also Chapter XII). 

The habit of taking Aspirin regularly or in large 
quantities, which too many women indulge in if 
sleepless during this time, is extremely bad both for 
the child and for the mother. Drugs of any sort 
should not be appealed to. If it is possible during 
these later months, sleep will be much more 
refreshing, and the advantage will be very great 
both to the coming child and the mother, if her 
bed can be arranged on a verandah or out of doors ; 

9i 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

but it must not be forgotten that towards the end 
of the period the expectant mother ought not to be 
out of ear-shot of someone. 

Now to consider the second group of disabilities ; 
those entirely the result of artificial outlook and 
condition. Among these must be classed the 
inability to walk any distance or to take part in 
active work of any sort. This is partly imposed by 
the hesitation of a woman to be seen at this time, 
and particularly to face the vulgar and leering 
attitude of the general public, and it is partly also 
due to the general heaviness or strain on the muscles 
or to the presence of varicose veins. If these have, 
by the methods just described, been almost or 
entirely avoided, she will find that her natural 
activity is much less reduced than it would other- 
wise be. To walk a mile or two, even three miles, 
the day before or even the day of the birth, is not 
at all beyond what can be expected from an ordin- 
ary healthy woman who lives as she should. 

The necessity perpetually to be fussing, to be 
taking tonics or drugs or medicines, to be thinking 
only of herself and never of any general or greater 
theme is also eliminated when the general health 
is improved, and any mental or bodily activity 

92 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

which the mother can indulge in without a great 
sense of strain would be advantageous to the child. 

The highly nervous condition and overstrained 
state of so many modern women during this time 
is due entirely to the artificial social lives, involving 
late hours, which they try to lead. The mother-to- 
be should give up almost all social engagements 
which keep her out of bed after 9 o'clock. Sleep, 
fresh air, exercise under the healthiest natural 
conditions which she can command, coupled with 
the right diet, will secure her health and strength 
throughout the time. 

The difficulties, however, about which help is 
most needed is the first group, those nature- 
imposed and inevitable difficulties which the 
woman has to face, and which, without instruction 
in the things she might do to mitigate them, often 
lead her to suffer intensely, though needlessly, and 
tend to have life-long effects on her health and 
appearance. Simple and sometimes obvious pre- 
cautions are required, and yet these are almost 
unknown to the generality of advisers to whom the 
prospective mother can turn. 

The first and most obvious inmost change that 
affects her is that felt in the muscles below the 

93 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

waist, particularly those which run vertically, and 
which support, by their elasticity and strength, the 
whole front of the body. As the months pass, and 
the child and its attendant tissues grow, there is a 
slowly increasing strain on these muscles. As the 
enlargement proceeds, the skin will also stretch, 
and the under-skin and tissues beneath it are 
finally stretched almost to breaking-point; 
stretched sometimes so that they do break apart 
and leave ultimate permanent little scars under 
the skin of the mother. Few apparently know, but 
all should know, that this can be almost entirely 
avoided (by fortunate women entirely avoided), 
if the skin and tissues immediately below it are 
kept supple by daily rubbing with olive oil from 
the fifth month. Perhaps from the fourth month 
once a week, and from the fifth month daily, the 
mother should rub the lower part of her body and 
her breasts with olive oil. This will not only have 
a soothing effect upon the skin, but will assist its 
elasticity in such a way that she may return to her 
virgin condition without leaving those tell-tale 
scars which so often mark a woman, and which 
many, even highly trained maternity nurses and 
doctors, seem to think are inevitable. Such scars 

94 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

are not inevitable, and this very simple precaution, 
coupled with exercise, will frequently be sufficient 
to avoid them altogether. 

The same internal growth which enlarges the 
muscles and strains the skin, will also sometimes 
press apart the two main vertical muscles in such a 
way that there is a tendency for part of the tissues 
to project, and for the last month or two this may 
be very uncomfortable without in any way being 
dangerous. It is then advisable to wear a small 
stiff pad over this, and fasten it in place with a 
narrow, soft elastic band. The use of localized 
plaster very often strains the skin and leaves scars 
or makes it sore. It is wiser to have the small hard 
central bandage wherever there is a tendency to 
localized projection as will be self-evident to any- 
one who experiences it. 

The natural darkening of the colour of the skin 
when it is strained and stretched, as it must be, is 
very displeasing to the eye, and particularly to a 
young girl whose beautiful body has been her de- 
light, and may be a cause of great distress and self- 
repugnance. It is well that she should be helped 
over this most anxious time of self-detestation by 
the reliable assurance that it is only a temporary 

95 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

phase, and that if she keeps in good health, and 
rubs herself with oil as I suggest for two or three 
months after birth as well as before, the skin will be 
entirely freed from any stained or discoloured ap- 
pearance, and will return to its normal condition. 

As the months pass, the actual physical weight 
of the body will increase, gradually becoming a 
greater burden, so that long distance walking and 
any acute activity such as running or tennis-playing 
must become impossible. Nevertheless, if the diet 
and mode of living suggested above is followed out, 
this will be very much less embarrassing than is 
usually experienced. 

Many forms of support or maternity corsets 
are advertised or medically recommended to assist 
to support the weight at such times, but, unless the 
woman has any actual slipping of the position of 
the organs or any deformity, she is very much 
better not to take such proffered assistance, for 
they will form a broken reed, and, as one knows, 
"the broken reed pierces the hand." It is much 
better for her to strengthen her own muscles by 
slow and careful exercise, bending forward until 
she touches the ground, or as nearly touches the 
ground as possible; also lying on her back on the 

9 6 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

ground, and rising without touching the floor with 
her hands and arms; also slowly raising the feet 
forward above the head while lying on the back, 
and then allowing them to drop slowly to the 
ground, this last exercise being very strengthening 
to the central muscles of the body wall (detailed 
accounts of other useful exercises will be found in 
Dr. Alice Stockham's Tokology). So long as there 
is no strain upon her, she should exercise through- 
out the whole of the time. She would then not 
need any artificial support, and would be much 
better without it. 

I have never seen it elsewhere clearly stated, 
but I have discovered that one very important 
reason against corsets is that, however well shaped 
and loose they may be, they tend to touch and 
exert some slight pressure on the soft tissues at the 
back of the waist; they must do so, merely to 
remain upon the body without dropping off, and 
this amount of pressure is sufficient to induce 
morning sickness, for the following among other 
reasons. As the womb grows in the centre of the 
body it pushes aside and to the back the many 
yards of soft tubular alimentary canal which 
normally lies coiled in the front of the body, and, 
7 97 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

if there is no constriction or pressure, these tend 
to find room for themselves round the waist line 
and to the back, so that there appears what seems 
almost like a coil or roll of fat around the waist. 
This disposition is very advantageous, however, and 
should in no way be interfered with, as any corset 
must, and it greatly reduces the ungainly frontal 
size and helps to keep the body better balanced. 
At first the breasts will become firmer and larger, 
and will support themselves more readily than at 
any time, but, later on, their shape somewhat 
changes and they tend to fall. They should then 
have carefully slung and properly arranged sup- 
ports looped over the shoulder. Neglect of this 
results in the final and lifelong loss of the beauty 
of the bosom, and it is indeed a cruel thing that the 
average doctor or nurse appears not to be capable 
of giving any useful advice on this point, so that 
hundreds of thousands of women have not only 
lost their beauty, but have been told that it is in- 
evitable, and the natural result of having borne a 
child. That it is well-nigh inevitable under mod- 
ern conditions may be, but with proper support, 
proper massage and treatment afterwards, it need 
not have been, and it need not be. 

98 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

A thing which often distresses girls, but which, 
however unsightly it is while present, is a tem- 
porary and passing phenomenon, is the sudden ap- 
pearance of freckles, even large patches of brown 
colouring matter on the skin during the time the 
baby is forming. So far as I am aware, nothing 
can be done to prevent it, and if, as sometimes 
happens, these brown patches appear on the face 
itself, it is a misfortune which must be endured as 
stoically as possible, encouraged with the know- 
ledge that it will entirely pass. 

Another curious thing I know one woman 
experienced, and about which I am awaiting fur- 
ther evidence, was the apparent transplantation by 
the child in the mother of the strong black body 
hairs of the father. The result was that during 
the later months of carrying, and for a few months 
after birth, the mother's lower limbs and forearms 
had a thick growth of masculine-like hair, which 
nearly all fell off within six months after the 
birth. 

The tendency that the coming child has to 
extract nutriment from the mother's tissues often 
results in the loss or temporary spoiling of two of 
her beauties, the beauty of her nails and the 

99 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

beauty of her hair. These are apt to Suffer unless 
she is warned in time and protects them. The 
injury to them probably depends on the with- 
drawal of the proper quantity of fat from the 
tissues. It is, therefore, advisable for the mother- 
to-be to rub her nails and hair with some suitable 
natural oil. Refined paraffin, almond oil, or castor 
oil for the hair are by far the best, and for the nails 
some animal grease such as lanoline, or perhaps 
simple vaseline. Expensive concoctions, very 
much advertised and claiming wonderful proper- 
ties, generally owe anything which they may con- 
tain to these two ingredients, but more frequently 
contain little or nothing of any value, and are often 
harmful. 

The more fundamental, and, alas, almost inevit- 
able result of bearing a child is that it extracts not 
only the fat from the system, but the hardening 
matter from the teeth. This indeed is, so far as I 
am aware, a theft from the mother by the next 
generation, which no knowledge of its liability can 
prevent, and which can only be met by a careful 
supervision of the mother's teeth both before and 
after birth. Women differ in the amount they 
lose, but it is, alas, one of the almost inevitable 

ioo 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

things that there shall be a certain weakening of 
the teeth. Sometimes this will right itself, and 
teeth which shook in their sockets immediately 
after the birth may apparently harden again and 
refix themselves firmly, but if the weakening takes 
the form of actual decay, then they must be at- 
tended to. 

In this respect the diet recommended by Dr. 
Stockham in Tokology, which advocates the elimin- 
ation of all calcareous food, is perhaps inadvisable 
if strictly followed out, because the growing child 
insists on mineral matter, and it simply takes it 
from the mother's structure if it does not get it in 
other ways. I have, therefore, thought it advis- 
able not entirely to eliminate the wheat and other 
bone making materials from the diet in the way 
Dr. Stockham recommends, but to maintain a 
certain proportion of wheat, especially whole wheat 
in the food. Her advice to replace rich dishes by 
simple rice, stewed fruits, etc., is certainly wise, 
and still more important is it to follow her warm 
recommendation to eat quantities of fresh fruit. 

One of the perfectly natural, but to the young 
mother rather unexpected, results of the changes 
of the later months is the alteration which grad- 

101 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

ually comes in the position of the centre of gravity 
of her whole body. She is, of course, scarcely 
conscious of this, and yet it is a point of some im- 
portance, because it results in a certain liability to 
slip and to fall, particularly coming downstairs. 
The danger of such a fall is less to the child, which 
is safely surrounded by a buffer of fluid and by the 
mother's protective muscles, but more to the 
mother herself, who, in falling, may strain or in- 
jure herself. The growth which results in this 
change in the centre of gravity comes too rapidly 
for the system quite perfectly to adjust itself to it. 
It will be remembered how long it takes a baby 
to learn to balance itself upright upon its feet; 
the adult mother-to-be has then had a whole 
lifetime knowing just how to balance, and with 
every muscle adjusted to the centre of gravity in 
its accustomed place. The change in the distribu- 
tion of weight changes the position of the centre of 
gravity to some extent, sufficiently at any rate to 
throw the co-ordination of many years somewhat 
out of gear, and it is, therefore, wise for the expect- 
ant mother to take particular care not to slip or 
stumble unexpectedly. The sudden and active 
movement of the child, which may kick or turn 

102 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT MOTHER 

with no warning may, at any moment, throw her 
right off her feet, particularly if she is on a steep 
staircase. It is well, therefore, to make a special 
point of keeping guard against this possibility by 
always having a firm grip on the handrail during 
the later months of carrying a child. 

However well and full of a sense of power and 
creative vitality she may be, a woman should take 
long hours of rest : to bed at nine each evening and 
not up till eight o'clock in the morning, and taking 
at least one hour lying down during the day. Dur- 
ing the nine months of bearing the unborn child, 
she should remember she is providing it with vital- 
ity every second of the twenty-four hours of each 
day, and she should neither have forced upon her, 
nor should she desire to do work which ever tires % 
her, though she should live an active, full, healthy, 
happy existence, and should be capable of nearly i 
all her normal work and enjoyments. If she is 
wise, she will work in direct contact with sun-lit 
earth. Gardening ensures not only the beauty of 
the resulting flowers, but the truest sense of 
physical well-being. 



103 



CHAPTER XI 

PHYSICAL DIFFICULTIES OF THE EXPECTANT FATHER 

I was a child beneath her touch — a man 

When breast to breast we clung, even I and she — 
A spirit when her spirit looked through me — 
A god when all our life-breath met to fan 
Our life-blood, till love's emulous ardours ran, 
Fire within fire, desire in deity. 

D. G. Rossetti. 

THE higher the evolution of the creatures, 
the more is the parental responsibility 
shared by both parents. In human beings, 
the institution of monogamy, which is universally 
accepted as a higher form of human relation than 
polygamy, involves in the dual partnership a cer- 
tain form of the sharing of the actual physical 
difficulties of parenthood b}^ the father which is not 
entailed in the fatherhood of a polygamous estab- 
lishment. In fact, a pure monogamy strictly 
maintained, does really affect the physical aspects 
of expectant fatherhood more than it does the 
physical aspects of expectant motherhood. 

104 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT FATHER 

The modern pair, being intensely and deeply- 
united, the effects of the experiences and physical 
states of one have actual reverberations and 
physical effects on the other. In this respect the 
change in her mentality and attitude towards him, 
which is sometimes the result of the physical effect 
of motherhood (see Chapter IV) , may have a very 
far-reaching influence upon the man's health and 
happiness if he does not comprehend the cause 
of this experience, and, through comprehension, 
know how to endure or overcome it. Undoubted- 
ly a home which is disturbed by uncomprehended 
antagonisms or suppressed irritations has a physical 
effect on the general mental balance, and conse- 
quently on the whole health of the pair involved. 

The way in which these difficulties can be over- 
come is by a mutual comprehension, so far as is 
possible, of the needs of each other, and sometimes 
perhaps the attitude of " bowing before the storm" 
until it has passed, recognizing that it is a phe- 
nomenon beyond human control. 

Beyond this may be subtler and more intricate 
reverberations from his wife's state. There has 
to be faced by the father-to-be the actual physical 
fact that perhaps rapidly following on the period 

105 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

when all his natural desires for a completed sex 
union with his wife were met and consummated by- 
equal desires in her, there comes a time when such 
impulses on his part are not only not responded to 
by his wife, but are perhaps antagonized, and may 
be entirely thwarted by either her mental or her 
physical condition. 

In Chapter XII, I will show how, to some extent, 
and at probably rather long intervals, his impulses 
may be not only satisfied, but may be harmoniously 
responded to, and may be profoundly valuable. 
Nevertheless, in almost every period of coming 
fatherhood, there will be at least some months 
when bodily union is actively repugnant, and con- 
sequently actively harmful, to the wife. At such a 
time the instinctive feeling of the mother against 
any act should be sufficient to bar it, because, even 
if the act itself should not be harmful, to force her 
will at such a time, or to lure her into coercing her- 
self against her own will, is in itself harmful. A 
young husband, therefore, will be faced by periods 
in which it will be impossible for him to have any 
of the unions to which he may have become accus- 
tomed, and which his natural virility may at first 
continue to demand. 

1 06 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT FATHER 

This difficulty is of very varying intensity for 
different types of men. Some feel it so acutely 
that, although they may do so with deep shame, 
they yield to the impulses and are unfaithful to 
their wives in a bodily sense, just at a time when 
of all others they may be mentally and spiritually 
most deeply united to her. Such shameful conflict 
of will with deed must have blackened many a 
father's memory, and, with due understanding of 
all the circumstances, it should be eliminated from 
our race; it should not take place. Nature has 
created a way out for the man who deeply loves 
and is in sympathetic rapport with his wife. While 
the wife on whom he centres all his desires and love 
is in a bodily condition which deprives her from 
such an experience as a complete union with him, 
this fact has a mental and consequently a physical 
reaction on the better type of man, and he finds, 
sometimes even to his surprise, that the instinctive 
impulses to which he has been accustomed die 
down. At first, perhaps becoming only sufficiently 
dormant to be conquered by a deliberate exertion 
of the will, but as the weeks pass, and the inhibition 
from his wife increases, its reaction stills his desire 
also, and his need for unions may temporarily cease. 

107 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

This is partly to be explained as a nervous 
reaction due to his anxiety and his concentration 
of nervous force on his wife, which tend to inhibit 
the setting free of the vital energy which would 
otherwise demand an outlet. 

The vitality, the physical state, the needs, how- 
ever, of different men vary very greatly, and there 
are those who really do require some physical 
assistance in addition to will power, and even a 
religious determination to help them through 
this time of difficulty. For such I recom- 
mend daily thorough washing in cold water 
of the organs of generation; and when an over- 
mastering desire may come, the soaking of the 
whole body in as hot a full length bath as can be 
borne. 

It may perhaps sound fantastic because one has 
not yet scientific proof (neither had Leonardo da 
Vinci when he casually made the first announce- 
ment that our earth is a planet of the Sun), but I 
think, in addition to the physical presence of the 
secretions potentially demanding exit, that a very 
important factor in the desire for sex union is an 
electrical accumulation within the system, and, 
undoubtedly, the soaking in hot water tends to 

1 08 



DIFFICULTIES OF EXPECTANT FATHER 

disperse this tension, and to allay the urgency for a 
desire for a sex union. 

These two simple physical assistances, combined 
with a definite will to maintain himself purely for 
his wife, and the definite concentration of his- 
nervous energy to her support with the desire to 
contribute everything possible, mental and bodily, 
to the well-being of his child, should suffice to keep 
the body of a normal man in that condition which 
his best instincts will approve. Others more 
acutely handicapped by incorrigible and baser 
requirements, may have a hard time, if itj is in- 
supportable; the explanation of it may be the 
existence of some slight physical abnormality, for 
which they should and can get medical treatment. 

After the restraint of the time of betrothal, 
followed by the usage of the honeymoon, the strain 
of almost total deprivation again, due to the wife's 
pregnancy, is greater on the husband than it need 
be; and this is another argument in favour of 
deferring conception for at least some months or a 
year after the wedding. (Cf. Married Love, Chap- 
ter IX). 

Even when, as is indicated later, there may come 
times when the impulse of the potential family is 

109 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

to unite, the physical condition of the mother may 
offer a hindrance to the customary form of union, 
but this with tact and intelligence may be sur- 
mounted. 



no 



CHAPTER XII 

THE UNION OF THREE 

"The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." 

IN the early days of our modern civilization, 
that is to say within the last couple of hundred 
years, the treatment of women in Western 
Europe sank to a terribly low ebb. Although the 
last few years have done much to restore woman to 
some of her ancient rights and privileges, there are 
still among us a distressing proportion of ignorant, 
coarse, and consequently ruthless men who are not 
debarred from becoming husbands. Such men 
have been in the past in the habit of " using their 
wives' ' regardless of the desires, or even the actual 
health requirements, of the unfortunate women 
who are tied to them, and such men have made a 
practice of continuing to indulge in sex union, 
even through the later stages of pregnancy. I 
have heard from midwives, to my amazed horror, 

in 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

that some such depraved men (not bestial, for no 
beast behaves in such a way) have even used their 
wives while they are still in bed after childbirth. 
With such I have in this volume no concern beyond 
the mention that they are loathsome. 

Their existence, however, has had an effect 
on a better type, and has given rise to reaction on 
the part of men infinitely their superiors. Women 
who have seen their sister women thus outraged 
have had the support of men of sensitive conscience 
and consideration when they have claimed that 
the mother who is carrying her child is sacred and 
set apart, and must not be approached by her 
husband at all during the whole period of the carry- 
ing of the child. It has, therefore, come about 
that a large number of our best and most high- 
minded women (supported by correspondingly 
high-minded men, anxious to do the best that is 
within their power for their wives and children), 
hold the view that no sex union after the third 
month, or perhaps that no sex union at all is 
allowable during pregnancy. 

Now this is one more matter which has not 
begun to receive the consideration which it de- 
serves. When I wrote Married Love, I felt that I 

112 



THE UNION OF THREE 

was not entitled to decide on this subject, and I 
tried to hold the balance between the various 
opinions, and drew attention to the fact that the 
prospective mother of the lower creatures is always 
set apart. This was apparently misinterpreted by 
some of my readers as being a personal expression 
of opinion, and women wrote or spoke to me about 
the subject saying they were sure I was right 
because their husbands held the same opinion as I did, 
but the women themselves were ashamed, almost 
humiliated, to confess that during the carrying of 
their child they most ardently desired unions. 

To these, as individuals, I pointed out that I 
was very far from expressing a definite opinion in 
my book on this point, and that my actual opinion, 
indeed, inclined towards thinking that restricted 
unions would be advantageous. In the latest 
edition (the 7th) of my book, I enlarge on what I 
had to say on this subject, concluding : 

There is little doubt that in this particular, even 
more than in so many others, the health, needs, and 
mental condition of women who are bearing children 
vary profoundly. 

Through evidences from very various types of 
women in the last year or two, I have now accumu- 
8 113 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

lated facts in sufficient numbers to begin to see 
something approaching a possible generalization 
on this subject. 

One of the most striking things I noticed con- 
cerning the evidences I received was that the 
women who confessed to a desire for sex union 
while they were carrying a child were, almost with- 
out exception, the best type. A hasty generaliza- 
tion would have predicted that those very women 
with their pure attitude, their high degree of cul- 
ture, their intellectual attainments, and their 
gracious self-restraint in outer life were just exactly 
those women who would maintain a fierce chastity 
during the nine months. These quite remarkable 
corresponding experiences of similarly superior 
women forced the matter vividly upon my atten- 
tion, and I am now prepared to make a tentative 
generalization, coupled with the generalization to 
be found in Chapter XV. 

The attitude of one of the women who confessed 
her intimate feelings to me is typical of those of 
this type, and is illuminating. She is a woman of 
unusually gifted brain, well endowed physically, 
and a normally healthy mother in every respect; 
she is noted for a peculiar beauty and sweetness of 

114 



THE UNION OF THREE 

disposition, and an unusually high degree of sen- 
sitive appreciation of beauty and goodness. In 
conversation she said to me: " You know I feel so 
ashamed and degraded by myself, but just at the 
time when I felt I ought to be sacred from these 
things, I more ardently desired my husband than 
I had done throughout all my married life of 
fifteen years.' ' She then told me that her husband, 
who had been truly devoted to her all his life, was 
particularly considerate and thoughtful for her 
during her time of expectant motherhood, and 
that when she tentatively hinted at her wish for 
union with him, he refused tenderly on the grounds 
that the higher standard for men was to share, 
however difficult it was, in the nine months of 
complete abstinence. He said that, for the sake of 
the child and herself, he must refuse. The desire, 
however, in her recurred, much to her own shame 
and mortification, because she felt that what her 
husband said did represent the highest accepted 
standard of pre-natal conduct. Quite a number of 
rather similar and also exceptionally endowed 
women have confessed to me in almost the same 
terms the same feeling. 

Before I indicate my conclusions, I should like 
US 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

to consider some of the surrounding circumstances 
of this problem. As I said in the opening para- 
graphs of this chapter, the nobler and better men 
have been carried away by a certain type of woman 
into thinking that it is man's share of the difficul- 
ties and self-sacrifice of parenthood that he should 
entirely sacrifice what is spoken of as "his desires/' 
In my opinion, this attitude involves two profound 
fallacies. The first fallacy is that the act of sex 
union is to meet only "his desires''; it is not. 
Completed union is something infinitely greater: 
it is a consummation jointly achieved by both the 
man and his wife. This attitude I make clear in 
my book, Married Love. And I must postulate 
in this, my present book, the far-reaching effects 
on the bodily, spiritual, and mental health of a man 
and a woman concerned in this complex sex union. 
Therefore, the husband who mutually and con- 
siderately unites with his wife when she can accept 
him is not merely gratifying his own desire, he is 
enriching her whole system as well as his own 
through this mutual alchemy. 

Before following up the logic of this paragraph, 
let us turn to the woman and her needs. The 
drain on her system of providing for another life 

116 



THE UNION OF THREE 

out of her own tissues, and the substances which 
pass through her own body, must be very severe 
unless she is amply provided with all the subtle 
chemical compounds which are demanded of her. 
Now there is much evidence that in unmarried 
women, and in young wives who are debarred from 
sex union altogether, something approaching a 
subtle form of starvation occurs ; conversely that 
they absorb from the seminal fluid of the man some 
substance, " hormone/ ' "vitamine" or stimulant 
which affects their internal economy in such a 
way as to benefit and nourish their whole systems. 
That semen is a stimulant to a woman was long 
ago recognized as probable, and is now the opinion 
of several leading doctors. Reference to this will 
be found in Havelock Ellis, vol. 5, 1912. See 
also the paper by Toff in the Centralblatt Gynako- 
logie, April, 1903. Incidentally the converse is 
true, and the man who conducts himself properly 
during the sex union, and remains for long in con- 
tact with his wife after the ejaculation is completed, 
also benefits through actual absorption from his 
wife. For this I have the testimony of a number 
of men. 
If, therefore, the woman who is becoming a 
117 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

mother, and who is supporting a second life, feels 
the need of union with her husband, it is, in my 
opinion, an indication that her nature is calling 
out for something not only legitimate, but posi- 
tively beneficial and required, and that it should 
be not only a man's privilege, but his delight, to 
unite with his wife at such a time and under such 
circumstances. 

The maintenance of the right balance of the 
internal secretions of the various glands which re- 
act on sex activity is important to women at all 
times, and particularly during the time when a 
woman is becoming a mother. One of the results 
of the growth of the child is the increased activity 
of the thyroid gland in the neck, which consider- 
ably increases in size. 

A general account of the relation of such glands 
to a woman's mental and physical balance is found 
in Blair Bell's book, The Sex Complex (1916), but 
he does not deal with the special aspect of a wom- 
an's requirements which forms the subject of this 
chapter. 

There is, even with the type of woman who does 
feel the need of, and ardently desires some sex 
unions with her husband during the long months, 

118 



THE UNION OF THREE 

almost always a space of time, perhaps as much as 
two or three months consecutively, when she will 
have no such desires at all, and there are also 
times of special liability to lose the child through 
premature birth when unions should be avoided. 
Unexpected abortions most usually take place at 
the dates around the time which would have been 
a monthly period. 

When I consider the evidence which I have 
before me, which is almost exclusively from the 
very best type of women, and when I observe that 
the most generally perfected, and finest women of 
my acquaintance, and they in particular, desire 
occasional moderate intercourse during pregnancy, 
I feel that one has a guide to what is best for the 
race. In these women, and the conduct which their 
needs inspire, we have an indication of the truest 
and highest standard of all. The deviations of 
conduct may at last swing back from both the 
grossness of abuse and the reaction from it, and 
settle in the right and middle path. After the 
excessively virtuous, and perhaps undersexed type 
of woman in contrast to the totally base attitude 
of the earlier and coarser type of man has made 
the thoughtful speed from baseness to an ascetic 

119 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

absence of unions, we should be led back by 
these well-developed and well-balanced and noble- 
minded women to the right and middle way, in 
which the spontaneous impulse of the responsible 
mother will be the guide for her husband, and will 
benefit all three concerned. 

For, let us realize what a profound mystical 
symbol is enacted when the union is not that of a 
single man and woman, but of that holy trinity, 
the father, the mother, and the unborn child. 
Only during these brief sacred months can the three 
be united in such exquisite intimacy, and during 
all these months when the child is forming, it is 
only in the few infrequent embraces of subdued 
passion that the husband and father-to-be can 
come truly close to his child, that he can, through 
additions to her system from his own, assist the 
mother in her otherwise solitary task of endowing 
it with everything its growth demands. 

Every woman who is bearing a child by a man 
whom she loves deeply, longs intensely that its 
father should influence it as much as it is possible 
for him to do; in this way and in this way alone, 
can he give it of the actual substance of his body 
This view of mine, in the present crude state of 

120 



THE UNION OF THREE 

scientific knowledge must, of course, be stated as an 
hypothesis, but it will be proved later on when 
science is sufficiently subtle to detect the actual 
microscopic exchange of particles which takes 
place during proper and prolonged physical con- 
tact in the sex union. 

Light on my thesis is also shown by the converse : 
for instance, an interesting suggestion was made 
by a distinguished medical specialist as a result of 
his observation of two or three of his own patients, 
where the prospective mother had desired unions, 
and the husband had denied them thinking it in her 
interest; the doctor observed that the children 
seemed to grow up restless and uncontrollable, 
with a marked tendency to self -abuse. To these 
two or three instances, I have added some which 
have come under my own observation, and, al- 
though as yet the evidence is insufficient to sup- 
port a dogmatic attitude, I incline to think that, 
the deprivation of the mother of proper union 
during pregnancy tends to have a similar effect 
upon later children. That is to say that mothers 
whose natural desire for union has been denied, 
and mothers who are congenitally frigid, rather tend 
to produce children with unbalanced sex-feeling 

121 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

liable to yield to self -abuse. Immoderate and ex- 
cessive desire for sex union during pregnancy so 
far as I am aware is rare, and where it occurs, it 
should of course, be treated as an abnormality. 

The mother of the higher type, such as I have 
indicated in the paragraphs above, who does desire 
unions, will probably only require them infre- 
quently during these months. 

It should be obvious, but as the general public 
often lacks a visualizing imagination, I ought to 
add that, for the proper consummation of the act 
of union, particularly during the later months 
of coming parenthood, the ordinary position is not 
suitable and may be harmful. * 

Tolstoy's condemnation of any sex contact 
while the wife was pregnant or nursing may 
have influenced some serious men, but, as in 
many other respects, Tolstoy's teaching is so 
widely contradictory, and depends so much upon 
his own age and state at the time, one cannot but 
regret the unbalanced influence his literary power 
has given him. 

While this chapter may be taken as an indica- 

1 A couple more pages are to be found on this theme in the 
English edition: these I think useful, but I have omitted them 
at the request of the American publishers. M. C. S. 

122 



THE UNION OP THREE 

tion that sex union is, in my opinion, not only 
allowable but advisable for certain types during 
the time they are carrying a child, nevertheless, 
I do not wish it to be misinterpreted in such 
a way that a single act of union which is repug- 
nant to the prospective mother should be urged 
upon her "for her good." 

There is undoubtedly a large body of most 
excellent women who are as individuals distinctly 
rather undersexed, but who are, on the whole,, 
good mothers, profoundly well-meaning and 
right-minded and virtuous women to whom 
the time of prospective motherhood is an intensely 
individual period, during which they feel an 
active repugnance to any sex union. 

Women of this type are not able to give the 
completest dower to their children, but are im- 
mensely superior to the average and baser type 
which forms the majority. If such women do 
not spontaneously desire unions, they should 
be left unharried by any suggestion that they 
would benefit by them, and the husbands of 
such women should, in their own interests, curb 
any natural impulses which may conflict with the 
intense feeling of the wife. Husbands, however, 

123 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

should also be aware that such women generally 
feel as they do because they have never been wooed 
with sufficient grace and tenderness. 

To sum up, I am convinced that unless there 
is any indication of a disease or abnormal appetite 
in any respect, that the natural wishes and desires 
of the mother-to-be who is bearing a child should 
be the absolute law to herself and her husband, for, 
during these months, she is on a different plane of 
existence from the usual one. She is swayed by 
impulses which science is still incapable of analys- 
ing or comprehending, and experience has again 
and again proved that she is wise to satisfy any 
reasonable desire, whether for the spiritual, bodily, 
or mental contributions to her growing child's 
requirements or those which would strengthen her 
own power of supporting that child. 

Fortunate indeed is the husband of the best, 
well-balanced, and developed mother-to-be, who, 
with intense emotion, shares with him in the closest 
and most exquisite intimacy, the creating of a life 
which has every prospect of adding beauty and 
strength to the world. 



124 



CHAPTER XIII 

PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS 

"The mother is the child's supreme parent." 

Havelock Ellis. 

AT first invisible, with no outer changes to 
indicate the vital internal processes, from 
the moment of conception an intense 
activity has begun within the mother. Sometimes 
women are aware of the actual moment of con- 
ception, and faintly perceive for the first two or 
three days sensations, too delicate to be called 
pain, and yet intense and penetrating, as though 
of the lightest touch upon the inward and most 
sensitive consciousness. I have read reports of 
women, and know one personally, who felt the 
process of conception, although this will probably 
be generally received with incredulity. The ma- 
jority of people are less completely cognizant of 
the voices of their own organism, and, perhaps for 
two or three months, are almost unaware that 

125 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

anything different from the usual course of their 
life is taking place. 

If, as seems to me unquestionably the best 
and happiest relation, the man and woman who 
are creating a child are doing so deliberately, con- 
sciously, and with acute interest, a mutual know- 
ledge of the principal stages through which their 
child passes should add greatly to their interest and 
their feeling. 

From the first moment of its conception, indeed 
often for months before this has been possible, 
their child is to the loving pair a living entity of 
whom they may speak. 

The active egg cell, which is ready for fertiliza- 
tion, is produced in one or other of the two ovaries, 
which lie internally, and cannot be touched or 
reached in any way without operating upon the 
mother; they have no direct contact with the 
outer world. These two ovaries each communi- 
cate with the central chamber, which is called the 
womb or uterus, and this is a strong muscular 
organ, into the walls of which the attachment of 
the minute embryo fastens, and within which 
chamber the growing embryo gradually fills the 
space reserved for it. The womb or uterus has a 

126 



PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS 

connection with the outer world through the lower 
mouth called the os, which opens into the vaginal 
channel. This os or mouth with its rounded lip 
can just be felt at the end of the vaginal channel. 
Fertilization consists in the actual penetration 
of the egg cell by the male sperm, the nuclei of 
which unite. As I have elsewhere described 
{Married Love, Chap. V) the numbers of male 
sperm provided in any act of union outnumber by 
millions those actually required, because for each 
single fertilization, one egg cell combines with one 
sperm cell. The egg cell or ovum is very large in 
comparison with a single sperm ; nevertheless it is 
in itself a minute, almost invisible protoplasmic 
speck, measuring rather less than i/i20th of an 
inch in diameter, and roughly spherical in its 
shape — a minute pellet of jelly-like protoplasm 
with a concentrated centre or nucleus. The single 
sperm which unites with it is a still more minute 
fleck, and is little more than a nucleus with a film 
of protoplasm round it, and a long cilium or hair- 
like continuation which it lashes to and fro, and 
thus propels itself or swims towards the egg cell. 
Judging by analogy, it leaves this tail outside the 
egg cell on the mutual fusion. The nucleus of the 

127 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

sperm and of the egg unite in a very complex and 
precise manner. In other organisms, and probably 
also in human beings, the entry of a single sperm 
to the egg cell shuts out the possibility of other 
sperms fusing with them, because directly it has 
been fertilized, the egg cell exudes a film of sub- 
stance which antagonizes the other sperms, and 
which ultimately forms a filmy skin around itself. 
From the moment of the fusion of the nuclei of 
the male and female cells, active changes and 
nuclear divisions are in progress. The egg cell, 
which is free, travels slowly to the allotted place 
in the womb or uterus of the mother, and there it 
settles down in the tissue of the wall and attaches 
itself. Until it has attached itself firmly to the 
wall of the uterus, conception proper has not 
finally taken place, and a fertilized egg cell may be 
lost through want of a capacity to attach itself to 
the womb, or through some nervous or other dis- 
turbance of the walls of the womb, which throw it 
off after it has been attached. The distinction 
between the actual moment of fertilization (or 
union of the male and female nuclei) and of the 
final attachment which secures true conception 
is an important one, though frequently overlooked. 

128 



PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS 

Sometimes the failure to conceive a child may not 
at all be due to lack of fertility and readiness to 
unite on the part of the egg cell and sperm cell, 
but may be due to some nervous or other influence 
on the wall of the uterus, which consequently 
throws off the ovum before it has firmly settled into 
its place there. 

A few days after conception, and when the ovum 
has attached itself to the proper place, a definite 
zone of tissue begins to form which, growing and 
altering with the growth of the tiny developing 
child (which is now called the embryo), forms a 
medium of transmission between it and the mother 
through which pass the substances used and ex- 
creted by the embryo in its growth. 

After fertilization, intense and rapid activity 
takes place in the nuclei of the cells, first in the 
united nucleus of egg and sperm cell, and later in 
the nuclei of all the resulting division cells. The 
nucleus of the sperm cell is supposed to contain 
twelve chromosomes which go through a formal 
rearrangement and mingling with the correspond- 
ing chromosomes in the egg cell. As a result of 
the complete fusion and intermingling of the male 
and the female factors on fertilization, all the 
10 129 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

resulting divisions of cells which follow derive their 
nuclei partly from the male and partly from the 
female nucleus of the parents. Thus, if it were 
possible to trace the history of every tissue cell in 
the body of your child, it would show that each 
nucleus of all the myriads that compose its struc- 
ture would ancestrally consist of part of the many 
sub-divisions of the nuclei of both father and 
mother. Thus to speak of one side of the body as 
being male in its inheritance and the other female, 
is the most unmitigated nonsense, though this idea 
formed the basis of a recent book. 

The rapidity with which the first cells grow 
to form tissues, once they have been stimulated 
by union is very great, and from the ovum, which 
on the day of fertilization is only I /126th of an inch 
in size, the growth is so rapid that it is ten times 
as big at the end of fourteen days. By that time 
the length is one-twelfth of an inch, and it weighs 
one grain. By the thirtieth day, the tiny embryo 
is already one-third of an inch big, and were it 
possible, which, of course, it is not, to remove it 
living from its bed of tissue in the mother's womb 
and examine it, even with the naked eye, and still 
more with a magnifying glass, it would be possible 

130 



PROCESSION OP THE MONTHS 

to see the rudiments of the legs, head, and arms 
which are to be. 

By the fortieth day, the embryo is about one 
inch in length, and the shape of the child which it 
is to be, is quite clearly visible. Dark points are 
to be seen where later it will have eyes, nose and 
mouth, and there is already a hint of its backbone. 

Meanwhile, as may be realized, although to 
have grown in forty days to the size of an inch 
from a minute speck i/i20th part of an inch is a 
great and rapid achievement; nevertheless the 
existence of a thing one inch big within her makes 
little outer difference to the mother, and all the 
earlier weeks and months of the growth of this 
tiny organism do not yet take more visible effect 
on the mother's body than to enhance its contour. 
After the first child this effect is less noticeable, 
and a woman may be unaware that she is about 
to become a mother. The first sign in a really 
healthy woman generally is in the form of her 
breasts, which sometimes begin to enlarge by the 
second or third week. It is said that the more 
healthy and perfectly fitted for motherhood a 
woman is, the sooner her breasts show signs of the 
effect of the developing embryo but, particularly 

131 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

with a woman who has already borne a child, there 
may be no external sign until at least three months 
have passed. 

By the sixth week, the limbs and most essential 
parts of the child are apparent, and there are the 
minute indications of the beginning of its future 
sex organs. It is evident, therefore, that if there 
is any desire to control the sex of the coming child, 
it is already too late by the sixth week to do any- 
thing, were it ever possible reliably to control sex 
at any time. It is, therefore, apparent that any 
passionate desire for a child of one or the other sex 
which the mother may indulge in, when she knows 
she is about to be a mother, say, by the third or 
fourth month, is not only futile but also may be 
injurious (see Chapter XIV). 

By the second month, nearly all the parts are 
fully apparent, even the eyelids are visible in the 
embryo and a tiny nose begins to project; fingers 
and toes can be seen, and some centres of bone 
begin to harden, as for instance, in the ribs. 

By the third month, the embryo reaches . an 
average length of three or more inches, and weighs 
on an average about 2% ounces. In this month 
the sex organs of the future baby are rapidly 

132 



PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS 

developing, and indeed are rather unduly promi- 
nent in proportion to the other parts, which en- 
large relatively later. 

Between the third and the fourth month, but 
often not till a little after the fourth month, the 
active muscular movements of the embryo's limbs 
can be felt by the mother. The experience of this, 
as in the consciousness of the moment of concep- 
tion, depends very much upon the sensitiveness 
and delicate balance of the mother's conscious 
control of herself. 

Some are insensitively, though perhaps com- 
fortably, unaware of what is going on in their 
systems; others are conscious, not of what is 
properly going on, but what is going wrong in then- 
systems owing to disease or mal-adjustment, but 
there are others who, in perfect health, are yet so 
acutely sensitive and conscious that they can at 
will detect, as it were, the condition of their whole 
organs. Such women as these will sooner feel the 
active movements of the embryo than those who 
are less perceptive. As a rule, medical practi- 
tioners estimate that about half way between the 
date of conception and the date of birth, which 
should be a full nine calendar months, that is to say 

133 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

about 43^2 months from the date of conception, 
muscular movements of the child are detectable 
and distinct. 

In the third month, however, some women are 
conscious of the most delicate fluttering sensation. 

By the end of the third month, a definite en- 
largement of the mother's body becomes visible, 
because not only the actual child within her has to 
be accounted for in the space among her organs, 
but all the accessory growth of the chamber which 
accommodates the child in the womb has to find 
its place, the womb growing rapidly, and containing 
not only the child, but the large amount of fluid 
by which the child is surrounded, and in which it 
partly floats. The visible changes in the mother 
to some extent depend on the proportion of this 
fluid which develops, some having much more than 
others, and it is to this, rather than to the actual 
size of the child for the first four or five months, 
that any outward change is due. 

About the end of the third month the soft and 
cartilaginous beginnings of the vertebral column 
begin to harden in various centres, and after the 
hardening of the bones (or ossification) slowly 
spreads throughout the whole skeletal system, 

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PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS 

For some other bones in the body, however, the 
hardening is not fully completed by the time of 
birth. 

At the beginning of the fourth month, the 
general hair covering develops; the first formed 
hairs have only a short life. 

By the fifth month, the child weighs six to eight 
ounces, and is from seven to nine inches long. By 
this time its movements are very active and almost 
continuous except when it sleeps. It should be 
trained to sleep at the same time as its mother, and 
thus give her rest. My phrase "it should be 
trained to sleep" may arouse incredulous smiles 
from medical men, even from mothers who have 
borne children, but it is not impossible to train a 
child even so young as an unborn embryo, strange 
as it may seem. From about this month (the 
fifth) to the time of birth, the child appears to have 
a strong and definite personality, sometimes as if, 
in some strange and subtle way, it were possible to 
communicate with it. If there is that sweet and 
intense intimacy between mother and father which 
there should be, if the full beauty of parenthood is 
to be realized, the child is apparently, to some 
extent, conscious of the nearness of its father, and 

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RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

I know at least of one or two couples who spoke to 
their coming child as though it were present, and 
who, by a touch of the hand could, to some extent, 
control and soothe it so that it would sleep during 
the night when the mother desired to sleep. 

About the fifth month, the actual nails begin to 
grow, although the local preparations for their 
growth took place much earlier. 

After the fifth month, the child grows rapidly 
in weight, in the sixth month weighing nearly two 
pounds, and during the seventh nearly three. 

If it is placed in the best possible position, its 
head would be directed downwards, and it should 
be lying so that its arms and legs are tucked in 
much as a kitten curls up when it is asleep. It 
will move, however, sometimes completely round, 
entirely altering its position. 

By the eighth month, it weighs about four pounds 
and averages perhaps sixteen inches or so long, 
and should by this time be very active, so that its 
movements are not only strongly felt by the mother, 
but are externally quite visible. 

By the ninth month, at birth, the child weighs 
between six and eight or more pounds. It is 
better for the mother that it should not be too 

136 



PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS 

heavy, as, unless she is a large and strongly built 
woman, the actual weight of the child becomes a 
great strain upon her, however strong she may be. 

A child may be born during the seventh month, 
and children born during the seventh month live 
and have sometimes even grown up learned and 
important men. Sir Isaac Newton is an illus- 
tration of a seventh month child. Usually, 
however, a seventh month infant is terribly handi- 
capped; its skin is not yet fully developed, and, in 
many respects, it is quite unfitted to face the world. 

In connection with the seventh month child, 
many claims are made that a child is seven months 
at birth which are based on the miscounting of the 
date of conception, or a desire to conceal a pre- 
marital conception. When one is shown, as one 
sometimes is, a bouncing, healthy, ordinary baby, 
and told that it was "a very forward seven months 
child," those who know can only sigh, for an ordin- 
ary, healthy, bouncing baby with nails and well- 
formed skin has never yet been generated in seven 
months. 

The seventh month is the time of greatest 
danger for a late miscarriage, and many have been 
the disappointments of parents who ardently 

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RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

desired a child, but who lost it through premature 
birth at the seventh month. I have often wished 
to know why this should be so, and have found no 
satisfactory answer or indication of any scientific 
reason for this, but when revolving all the possi- 
bilities of ancestral reminiscence, it occurred to 
me that possibly our earlier ancestors, ancestors in 
fact so early as to be scarcely human, were born 
at the seventh month. I was, therefore, interested 
to look up the monkeys, and find that for some of 
them seven months is the date of normal birth. 
Possibly, some such ancestral characteristic may 
make the seventh month a critical time in the 
development of the human embryo, a time when 
it inherits the reminiscence of the possibility of 
separating itself from its mother and coming into 
the outer world. 

The times, moreover, when birth is most liable 
are those few days in each month which correspond 
to the regular menstrual flow in the woman, the 
periods which would have taken place at each 
twenty-eight days had not the child been develop- 
ing. It is, therefore, often desirable, particularly 
for the later months, for the woman to take one or 
two days of complete rest, or even to remain in 

138 



PROCESSION OP THE MONTHS 

bed during that dangerous day or two, so as to 
minimize the possibility of a miscarriage. 

The same applies, of course, to some extent, 
to the eighth month, but, curiously enough, mis- 
carriages in the eighth month appear to be less 
frequent. It is also popularly said that it is more 
difficult to rear a child born in the eighth month 
than one born in the seventh, though this does not 
appear to be true. 

The last week or two of the child's ante-natal 
existence are used by it in finishing itself off; 
growing its tiny shell-like nails, losing the downy 
hair which covered its body earlier in its existence, 
and in a sense preparing itself, and particularly its 
skin, for contact with the outer world, which is to 
come. Its movements are very active, and if it is 
in the most perfect position, the head tends to sink 
deep down towards the canal through the circle of 
bone through which it will have to pass (see Chap- 
ter III). 

The question is often asked as to which is the 
time when the embryo is most sensitive to outward 
impressions, but still there is no sufficient body of 
evidence to show that at any particular time more 
than another (unless it be the actual day of con- 

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RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

ception, see Chapter II) is the power of influence 
greater. 

Is it possible to prearrange to determine the sex 
of the child which is voluntarily conceived ? Since 
earliest human experiences have been recorded, this 
has formed the theme of some writers and thinkers, 
and a variety of opinions have been expressed, 
theories propounded, and rules for the production 
of a girl or boy at will have been given. Each of 
the views, however, still remains far from being 
established, and damaging exceptions may be 
found to every theoretic rule. The impartial 
observer must feel that we are still unable to con- 
trol the sex of the child. 

There are three main theories on this subject: 
(a) one is that the nature of the child which will 
be produced is already predetermined in the ovum 
and sperm cell before they have united; (b) the 
second theory is that the critical moment which 
settles the sex of the future offspring is the mo- 
ment of fertilization and the changes in the nucleus 
immediately resulting from it; (c) and the third 
theory is based on the view that the differentia- 
tion of the organs, which makes the difference in 
sex, take place at some stage in the embryo's 

140 



PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS 

development after it is already a many-celled 
organism. 

The first named theory lies behind the advice 
which varies around the theme that according to 
whether the conception takes place from the egg 
cell grown in the right or the left ovary and testicle, 
so will the child be a boy or a girl. Instances of 
the desired child proving to be of the sex "arranged 
for" by following out some such methods are of 
comparatively frequent occurrence, but to the 
scientist are completely counter-balanced by other 
and negative results. 

The second and third theories do not offer the 
same explicit application in practical advice. But 
all the practical advice, on whatever basis it is 
builded, appears to me to be laid on insecure foun- 
dations. In my opinion, the complexities of the 
factors which determine sex are such that it de- 
pends much more, not on the outward and visible 
nutrition of the mother, but on the inner and al- 
most inscrutable quality of the nutrition of the 
ovum and spermatozoon before and immediately 
after fertilization has taken place. 

That sex, even in some vertebrate creatures, is 
actually controllable through nutrition can be 

141 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

easily demonstrated with a batch of frog's eggs. 
These can be divided into two portions, and by 
simple difference in the feeding of the young tad- 
poles, male or female frogs can be obtained; the 
richly nourished ones produce the female frogs, 
those on sparser diet the male. The human em- 
bryo, however, developing in and through its 
mother, will depend to some extent on her diet, 
but in a much less direct way, for, as all know, the 
actual nutrition of the system does not merely 
depend on the quantity and valuable nature of the 
food taken into the mouth; it depends equally or 
even more on the digestive power, on the circula- 
tory system, even on the mentality of the person 
who eats, and to add still further to the complexity, 
the tissues and organs of one part of the body may 
be receiving fully sufficient nutriment, while, ow- 
ing to some hindrance or difficulty, some other 
tissues may be wasting and under-nourished. It 
is consequently necessary, before we can theorize, 
to determine, even in the healthiest woman, 
whether or no a very rich and abundant nutriment 
is reaching the developing embryo in its earliest 
and most critical days, for, on the other hand, just 
in this critical time, a woman relatively ill-fed and 

142 



PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS 

in relatively poorer health may be digesting well 
her simple diet, and may be so stimulated as to 
provide for the minute developing embryo a richer 
and more nutritious environment than her better 
fed sister. Consequently, even if, as I incline to 
believe, the predetermination of sex depends on 
the nutriment procurable by the early dividing 
cells of the embryo, it is still almost beyond the 
realm of scientific investigation or of human con- 
trol to determine whether or not the embryo is 
surrounded with such stimulating food as will 
produce a girl, or the rather sparser diet which will 
produce a boy. 



HS 



CHAPTER XIV 

PRE-NATAL INFLUENCE 

11 To leave in the world a creature better than its parent, this is 
the purpose of right motherhood." 

Charlotte Gilman: Women and Economics. 

ON the power of the mother directly to in- 
fluence her child while it is still unborn, 
diametrically opposite opinions have been 
expressed, and without exaggeration, I think, one 
may safely say that the tendency of biological 
science has been to scout the idea as "old wives' 
tales' ' and incredible superstition. Fortunate 
indeed it is that though our immature and often 
blundering science has, in many ways, permeated 
and influenced our lives, yet this denial of profound 
truth by those incapable of handling it in the true 
terms of science, has not entirely barred this 
avenue of power to the mother. Fortunately 
there are innumerable children who owe their 
physical and spiritual well-being to the profound 

144 



PRE-NATAL INFLUENCE 

racial knowledge still dormant in the true woman. 
As I said when I touched upon this question in 
Married Love: 

Yet all the wisest mothers whom I know vary only 
in the degree of their belief in this power of the mother. 
All are agreed in believing that the spiritual and 
mental condition and environment of the mother does 
profoundly affect the character and spiritual powers 
of the child. 

Alfred Russel Wallace, the great naturalist and 
co-discoverer with Darwin of Evolution, was in 
many respects a pioneer of unusual foresight and 
penetrating observation, who thought that the 
transmission of mental influence from the mother 
to the child was neither impossible nor even very 
improbable. In 1893 he published a long letter 
detailing cases, which he prefaced by saying : 

The popular belief that pre-natal influence of the 
mother affected the offspring physically, producing 
moles and other birth-marks and even mal-f ormations 
of a more or less serious character, is said to be entirely 
unsupported by any trustworthy facts, and it is also 
rejected by physiologists on theoretical grounds. But, 
I am not aware that the question of purely mental 
effects arising from pre-natal mental influence of the 
mother has been separately studied. Our ignorance of 

145 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

the causes, or, at least of the whole series of causes, 
that determine individual character is so great that 
such transmission of mental influence will hardly be 
held to be impossible or even very improbable. It is 
one of those questions on which our minds should 
remain open, and on which we should be ready to 
receive and discuss whatever evidence is available; 
and should a prima facie case be made out, seek for 
confirmation by some form of experiment or observa- 
tion, which is, perhaps, less difficult than at first sight 
it may appear to be. 

In one of the works of George or Andrew Combe, I 
remember a reference to a case in which the character 
of a child appeared to have been modified by the 
pre-natal reading of its mother, and the author, if I 
mistake not, accepted the result as probable, if not 
demonstrated. I think, therefore, that it will be 
advisable to make public some interesting cases of 
such modification of character which have been sent 
me by an Australian lady in consequence of reading 
my recent articles on the question whether acquired 
characters are inherited. The value of these cases 
depends on their differential character. All mothers 
state that in each of their children (three in one case 
and four in the other) the character of the child very 
distinctly indicated the pre-natal occupations and 
mental interests of the mother, though, at the time 
they were manifested in the child, they had ceased 
to occupy the parent, so that the result cannot be 
explained by imitation. The second mother referred 
to by my correspondent only gives cases observed in 

146 



PRE-NATAL INFLUENCE 

other families which do not go beyond ordinary 
heredity. 

. . . Changes in mode of life and in intellectual 
occupation are so frequent among all classes that 
materials must exist for determining whether such 
changes during the pre-natal period have any influence 
on the character of the offspring. The present com- 
munication may perhaps induce ladies who have 
undergone such changes, and who have large families, 
to state whether they can trace any corresponding 
effect on the character of their children. — Nature, 
August 24, 1893, pp. 389, 390. 



Yet this suggestive pronouncement of the world- 
famous naturalist has never been seriously followed 
up by scientists. I think the time is now ripe for 
a definite statement that: The view that the 
pregnant woman can and does influence the mental 
states of the future child is to-day a scientific hy- 
pothesis which may be shortly proved. I make 
this definite statement, in conjunction with the 
cognate and illuminating facts from other fields 
of research, a few of which are discussed in the 
following pages. 

That our mental states can affect, not only 
our spirits and our points of view, but actually 
the physical structure of our bodies, is demon- 

147 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

strable in a hundred different ways, and appears 
either to be proved or merely suggested according 
to the bias and temperament of the one to whom 
the demonstration is made. But there is one at 
least of these physical correlations which can be 
demonstrated with scientific thoroughness, and 
which proves beyond doubt that the mental state 
of the mother has a reaction upon her infant, even 
after it has severed its physical connection with her 
and is a baby of a few months old. This fact is 
that a nursing mother who is subjected to a violent 
shock, which results in a paroxysm of temper or 
of terror in her own mind, conveys the physical 
result of this to her infant when next she nurses it, 
so that the child has either an attack of indigestion 
or a fit. The effect of the mother's mental state 
is transmitted by the influence on the milk, the 
chemical composition of which is subtly altered by 
her nervous paroxysm, and w r hich thus acts as a 
poison to the infant. 

A much more subtle and closer correlation 
must exist between the mother's mental state and 
the child when it is still not yet free and independ- 
ent in the outer environment of the world, but while 
it finds in her body its entire environment, its 

148 



PRE-NATAL INFLUENCE 

protection, and the resources out of which it is 
building its own structure, and while the blood and 
the tissues of her body form its whole world, and 
while through them and through them alone can it 
obtain all its nourishment. 

True, the result of the mental state of the 
mother which we can see is, apparently, merely 
the physical result on the child's digestion of the 
milk which has become poisoned: but to stop at 
this point like a jibbing mule, and to refuse to take 
the further step in the argument because the child 
is yet too young for us to understand its resulting 
mental states, which reason indicates must be 
correlated with its poisoned digestive system is to 
defraud the mind of the logical conclusion of a 
sequence of ideas. 

The argument is as follows: 

(a) The mother's intense mental experience and 
consequent nervous paroxysm has a physical 
result upon the composition of her milk (presum- 
ably, therefore, upon other portions of her body, 
though this is irrelevant for the moment) ; 

(b) This physically altered milk has a physical 
effect upon the infant who shows other and more 
extreme forms of physical distress; 

149 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

(c) This physical distress must obviously to 
some greater or lesser degree, affect the child's 
nervous system; and, 

(d) Which is the point where the old-fashioned 
will break off, consequently the child's mental 
state — although it is too young to translate this 
into conscious forms. 

Examples of the effect of mental states on 
bodily functions could, were I to make this the 
main thesis of my book, be readily multiplied, and 
illustrations, either usually recognized as such or 
quoted in other connections, could be found in a 
great number of medical and semi-medical works. 
I here bring together a few which, when placed in 
juxtaposition, offer if not proof, yet such strong 
support of my theme as to place it in the realm of 
the scientifically ascertainable. For instance, 
Blair Bell in The Sex Complex, 191 6, says: 

Religious mania may lead to ideas which fill the 
patient with abhorrence of sexual intercourse, and in 
this way directly interfere with the genital functions. 
There is indeed no doubt whatsoever that the mind 
influences function just as function influences the 
mind; for example, it has been shown that fright leads 
to an immediate increase in the output of suprarenin, 

150 



PRE-NATAL INFLUENCE 

and we know well from constant clinical observations 
that hypothyroidism leads to mental depression (pp. 
209 and 210). 

and Havelock Ellis in The Psychology of Sex says : 

We can, again, as suggested by Fere, very well be- 
lieve that the maternal emotions act upon the womb, 
and produce various kinds and degrees of pressure on 
the child within, so that the apparently active move- 
ments of the fcetus may be really consecutive on un- 
conscious maternal excitations. We may also believe 
that, as suggested by John Thomson, there are slight 
inco-ordinations in utero, a kind of developmental 
neurosis, produced by some slight lack of harmony of 
whatever origin, and leading to the production of mal- 
formations. We know, finally, that, as Fere and 
others have repeatedly demonstrated during recent 
years by experiments on chickens, etc., very subtle 
agents, even odors, may profoundly effect embryonic 
development and produce deformity. But how the 
mother's psychic disposition can, apart from heredity, 
affect specifically the physical conformation or even 
the psychic disposition of the child within her womb, 
must remain for the present an insoluble mystery, 
even if we feel disposed to conclude that in some cases 
such action seems to be indicated. 

Direct evidence in proof of the view that the 
mother's state has not only an effect, but a lasting 
effect, on the child is seen in the fact quoted by 

151 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

Marshall in The Physiology of Reproduction, 1910, 
p. 566: 

So also it has been found that immunity from dis- 
ease may be acquired by young animals being suckled 
by a female which had previously become immune, the 
antibody to the disease being absorbed in the ingested 
milk. 

Further argument upon these lines might well 
be brought forward in favour of the view that the 
potential mother, during the months whilst she is 
acting as the child's total environment in all 
physical ways, is also through her mental states 
and conditions affecting the child's ultimate men- 
tality and artistic and spiritual powers. 

This subtle control exerted over the formation of 
the child may be visualized as more like some 
effect parallel to the remote influences of the in- 
ternal secretions in controlling the other organs of 
the body, than the more mechanical picture of 
things visualized by the Mendelians and those who 
concentrate on the purely physical and material 
aspects of heredity as related to chromosome struc- 
ture. 

The tendency in recent years in biological work 
has been far too much to lay stress upon the cur- 

152 



PRE-NATAL INFLUENCE 

iously mathematical laws Mendel discovered, and 
consequently to concentrate attention upon the 
physical chromosomes as containing the factors 
which carry hereditary qualities. Physiologists 
are now making an attempt to bring back into the 
treatment of life a more rational outlook, and 
nothing has contributed more to the scientific 
basis of this than the theory of the Hormones or 
internal secretions originated by Starling (see the 
Croonian Lecture, 1909), and followed up by many 
physiologists and some medical men (see for in- 
stance the recent work of Blair Bell, The Sex 
Complex, 1 91 6). 

One may perhaps combine the physiological 
and the mechanical outlooks by forming a rough 
mental picture of what is happening. One then 
obtains the idea that the mother is, through her 
mental states, affecting, and to some extent con- 
trolling, the production of the various internal 
secretions, and other more subtle and still unde- 
tected influences from various organs upon other 
organs, and that, in so doing she is making the 
environment for the various hereditary factors, 
in which their potentialities find it possible to 
develop or to be suppressed according to the cir- 

153 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

cumstances which she thus creates. As is now 
beginning to be realized, we all have an immense 
number of latent potentialities, which may lie 
dormant and develop only under suitable cir- 
cumstances. 

Thus in my view the mother may actually and 
in every sense fundamentally influence and control 
the character of her child, working through the 
remote effects of internal secretions which play on 
the complex material factors of hereditary qualities 
which form the material basis of the child's po- 
tentialities. 

Thus both heredity and environment have a 
vital part to play in building character, but greater 
than either is the subtler environment within the 
prospective mother created by her during the nine 
ante-natal months. 

Sometimes people, who would otherwise like 
to believe that a mother has this power, are de- 
terred by their own or the experience of others, who 
have, under conditions of distress and unfavourable 
circumstances, had children whose dispositions 
seem not to have suffered, but appeared as sunny 
and happy as a child apparently conceived under 
more favourable circumstances. Here, however, 

154 



PRE-NATAL INFLUENCE 

one is immediately faced by the difficulties of 
accurate observation, entailing a large number of 
data, which tend to cancel out; for the mother 
who may personally have been below her usual 
standard of health and spirits while bearing the 
child may, nevertheless, actually be in such a good 
physical condition, or be a member of such a sound, 
healthy stock that the child's heredity was better 
than that of the average human being, and con- 
sequently that the child itself was provided with a 
healthy well-run body. 

While to contrast with it, and apparently to 
refute my thesis, there may be a mother full of the 
most ardent hopes and buoyant mentality, looking 
forward with supreme joy to the advent of her 
baby, doing all she can to give it every beautiful 
mental impression and physical health, whose work 
may yet be undone by some cruel chance, such as 
venereal infection, or some local malformation 
which has resulted in weakness in, let us say, the 
child's digestion. We all know how peevish mere 
indigestion will make anybody. Or she, the well- 
intentioned and outwardly well-circumstanced 
mother may, unknown to herself, have been 
battling against a greater handicap in some racial, 

155 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

heritable defect in her husband; the child, therefore 
may, with all her efforts, yet fail to be joyous owing 
to the too strong physical handicap which chance 
or heritable disease had given it. 

The existence of such apparently conflicting and 
contradictory individual instances in no way 
refutes my main thesis, and that is, that granted 
equal conditions of clean and wholesome ancestry, 
granted equally favourable conditions of health 
and nutrition for the mother during her period of 
carrying the child, that that child benefits and is 
superior to the other who has had the advantage 
not only of a serene and mental happiness on the 
part of the mother, but of her conscious effort to 
transmit to it a wide and generally intellectual and 
spiritual interest in the great and beautiful things 
of the world. 

This fact is often illustrated in the different 
children of the same parents. Of children born 
under as nearly identical circumstances as may be 
possible within a year or two of time, the one may 
have a totally different disposition with totally 
different qualities from the other. The chance of 
birth, the inheritance of the innumerable possible 
characteristics latent in both parents might be 

156 



PRE-NATAL INFLUENCE 

sufficient to account for this were chance alone at 
work, but very often information may be obtained 
from the observant mother which correlates her 
own state while carrying the child with the after 
condition of the child itself. 

One rather striking instance of such a correla- 
tion is by a curious chance known to me, and 
should be of general interest. Oscar Wilde, whose 
genius was sullied by terrible sex crimes, which he 
expiated in prison, is known to all the world as a 
type whose distressing perversion is a racial loss. 
His mother once confided to an old friend that all 
the time she was carrying her son Oscar, she was 
intensely and passionately desiring a daughter, 
visualizing a girl, and, so far as was possible, using 
all the intensity of purpose which she possessed to 
have a girl, and that she often, in after years, 
blamed herself bitterly, because she felt that pos- 
sibly his perverted proclivities were due to some 
influence she might have had upon him while his 
tiny body was being moulded. 

Evidence upon this subject of the power or 
otherwise of the mother to influence her coming 
child is wanted, and it is very difficult to obtain, 
partly because of the reticence of those who have 

157 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

been through the dim and secret mysteries of 
motherhood, and partly because their accuracy 
cannot well be tested until after the child has 
reached maturity, by which time the mother is 
likely to have forgotten, or to be swayed by the 
course the child's life has taken unconsciously into 
laying stress upon one or other point which may 
seem correlated with its after achievements. 

Evidence, however, in the form of notes kept 
during the time the mother is carrying the child, 
which may thereafter be compared with the child's 
life in later years are very valuable, and, if any 
readers have such with which they would entrust 
me, a sufficient body of such evidence might be 
accumulated to assist materially in the formation 
of a strong spiritual asset to assist the creation of 
the best possible human beings. 

The father who desires to influence his child 
must do so through the mother: had clever men 
more generally realized this we should have heard 
less of the lament that clever men so often have 
stupid sons. 

Of the more physical aspects of the mother's 
power to influence the form of the development of 
her growing child we have abundant evidence. 

158 



PRE-NATAL INFLUENCE 

If the mother is starved, and by starved I mean 
less the actual starvation from want of food than 
the subtler starvation of improper food, or food 
lacking in the truly vital elements, then the child 
visibly suffers in weaknesses, for instance such as 
rickets, a disease of grave racial significance to 
which reference has already been made (see Chap- 
ter III). 

A simple diet, the simpler the better, is sufficient 
adequately to provide all the essentials of nourish- 
ment for the mother and her coming child, and 
much indeed may be done for the general health 
and beauty of the child by providing the mother 
with the best form of material from which the 
embryo may build itself. The use of foods con- 
taining large quantities of vitamine (real butter 
and oranges, for instance, are specially good) is 
very advisable. They are not only enriching in 
their action in assisting true assimilation of other 
foods, but they probably tend to make good the 
general drain on the mother's vitality, which would 
naturally take place were she not amply provided 
with these most subtle ingredients, which, though 
present in such minute quantities in fresh food, 
are yet of incalculable value. The effect of proper 

159 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

and specially adapted dieting, not only on the 
health of the mother, but also on the beauty and 
general vigour of the child, is a thing which is 
particularly expressed by various writers who have 
followed up the early experiments on diet made by 
Dr. Trail. r 

Those lovers who ardently desire their child and 
have a mental picture of it long before its birth, 
may delight in speaking of it to each other as 
though it were, as indeed it is, alive. For this a 
name is required, but in order to avoid the danger 
suggested previously it is wiser perhaps to choose 
the name of both a girl and a boy, the name which 
the child would be called by according to its sex 
after birth, and, while it is still unseen, to link the 
two together in speaking of the coming child. 

1 This book has been reprinted in a modern expurgated and 
mutilated edition, which deprives the reader of the most valuable 
portions of the author's work. I should advise readers to see one 
of the original early editions if they desire to read the book in- 
tended by the author for the public. 

There is also Dr. Alice Stockham's book, Tokology, to which 
I have previously drawn attention. - Although, as I then said, it 
contains errors of a comparatively trivial nature such as calling 
carbonaceous material "carbonates," which may have been 
sufficient to prejudice the scientific mind against the rest of her 
work, it contains the profound and valuable message Mr. Row- 
bo tham published in England in 1841, amplified, and to some 
extent enriched by this woman doctor's experience. 

160 



PRE-NATAL INFLUENCE 

Sometimes for private reasons, a girl in particu- 
lar or a boy in particular may be desired, but the 
well-balanced mind of a parent, particularly of the 
first child, should welcome either a son or a daugh- 
ter, each of whom has its peculiar charms, neither 
of whom can be described as more valuable than 
the other. Our false estimate of boys is largely 
due to economics and the custom of male entail. 
This should, and of course will, be altered. It is 
the first child, whether boy or girl is no matter, who 
is "the firstborn' ' with all that that connotes in 
rapture and wonder to its parents. 

Owing to the fact that more boys are born 
than girls, there is always the .greater chance of the 
birth of a boy than a girl. From this point of view 
it would appear that girls are more precious, but 
boys are oftener ailing and feeble and difficult to 
rear, so that it is perhaps well that more of them 
should be born than of their stronger sisters. 

Throughout its coming, the little one should be 
thought of in such a way that it will be equally 
welcome whichever its sex, and thus given the 
best chance of developing fully and naturally in 
its own way. 



ii 



161 



CHAPTER XV 

EVOLVING TYPES OF WOMEN 

Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace 
of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight. 

Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draught of thy wine of 
various colours and fragrance, filling this earthen vessel to the 
brim. 

No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. The delights of 
sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight. 

Yes, all my illusions will burn into illumination of joy, and all 
my desires ripen into fruits of love. 

Tagore: Gitanjali. 

ONE of the great sources of disharmony in 
our social life is the extent of the extra- 
ordinary ignorance about ourselves which 
still persists. From this spring the conflicting 
opinions and diametrically opposed views, and 
also the apparently self-contradictory evidence 
on almost any point of fundamental importance 
which is brought before the public. 

In no respect is there more conflict of opinion 
than concerning the age at which a woman should 
marry and become a mother. On the one hand, 

162 



EVOLVING TYPES OP WOMEN 

we have advocates of very early motherhood, and 
they point to the fact that a girl of seventeen is 
often already a woman and strongly sexed; they 
point to the hackneyed statement "that a girl 
matures sooner than a boy" ; they point to the fine 
and healthy babies which very young mothers may 
bear and to the greater pliability and ease of birth, 
and these facts and their arguments may appear 
conclusive. On the other hand, the actual experi- 
ence of many people is conflicting with these 
apparently justified conclusions. 

All the highly evolved races tend to prolong 
childhood and youth. All tend to replace early 
marriage by later marriage and parenthood to the 
obvious advantage of the race. 

Marriage and parenthood at fourteen, fifteen, 
and sixteen, which once were common in almost 
every country, are being replaced by later marriage 
and parenthood. As Finot says: 

A mystic chain appears to attach the age for love to 
the consideration enjoyed by women. In the Far 
East, woman is offered very young to the passion of 
man, and disappears from existence at the time her 
contemporaries are beginning to live. Love, for this 
very reason, has a purely sensual stamp, degrading to 

163 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

man and to woman. The lengthening of the age of 
love elevates the dignity, and at the same time in- 
creases the longevity of woman. Beyond the age of 
thirty or forty the woman, dead to love, was fit only 
for religion or witchcraft. Her life was shattered. 
Prematurely aged she went out of the living world. 
The prolonged summer of Saint-Martin in women will 
doubtless have consequences which we should be 
wrong to fear. There is a solidarity of ages. The 
cares bestowed on the child benefit the old man. The 
enlargement of the age maturity allows the child longer 
to enjoy the years of life that are intended to form 
bodies and souls. . . . The sentimental life of the 
country has undergone similar results. Balzac, in 
proclaiming the right to love on the part of the woman 
of thirty, aroused in his contemporaries astonishment 
bordering on indignation. In his day, was not a 
man of forty-four considered an old man? 1 Let us 
not forget that forty or fifty years before Balzac, a 
philosopher like Charles Fourier, despairing of the 
sentimental fate of young girls who had not found 
a husband before the age of . . . eighteen years, 
claimed for them the right to throw propriety to the 
winds. According to the author of the Theorie des 
Quatre-Mouvements, 2 this was almost the critical age 
{Problems of the Sexes, 1913). 

The relative ages of husband and wife also have 
their influence, but should, to some extent, depend 

1 Balzac: Physiologie du Mariage. 

2 Charles Fourier, Leipzig, 1808. 

164 



EVOLVING TYPES OF WOMEN 

more on their physiological age than on their actual 
years. They should, however, not be widely 
different. As Saleeby says: 

The greater the seniority of the husband, the more 
widowhood will there be in society. Every economic 
tendency, every demand for a higher standard of life, 
every aggravation of the struggle for existence, every 
increment of the burden of the defective-minded, 
tending to increase the man's age at marriage, which, 
on the whole, involves also increasing his senior- 
ity — contributes to the amount of widowhood in a 
nation. 

We, therefore, see that, as might have been ex- 
pected, this question of the age ratio in marriage, 
though first to be considered from the average point 
of view of the girl, has a far wider social significance. 
First, for herself, the greater her husband's seniority, 
the greater are her chances of widowhood, which is in 
any case the destiny of an enormous preponderance of 
married women. But further, the existence of widow- 
hood is a fact of great social importance because it so 
often means unaided motherhood, and because, even 
when it does not, the abominable economic position of 
women in modern society bears hardly upon her. It is 
not necessary to pursue this subject further at the 
present time. But it is well to insist that this senior- 
ity of the husband has remoter consequences far too 
important to be so commonly overlooked {Woman 
and Womanhood, 191 2). 

165 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

I have observed many girls, who were in every 
true sense of the word girls (that is unconscious 
of personal sex feeling, still growing in bodily 
stature and still developing in internal organiza- 
tion) until they were nearly thirty years of age. 
In my opinion, the girl who is thoroughly well- 
balanced, with an active brain, a well-developed 
normally sexed body, natural artistic and social 
instincts is not more than a child at seventeen, 
and to marry her at that age or anything like it is 
to force her artificially, and to wither off her poten- 
tialities. 

The type of woman who really counts in our 
modern civilization is, as a rule, not of age until 
she is nearly thirty. Not only does she not ma- 
ture sooner than a boy ; she matures actually later 
than a large number of men. I have now ac- 
cumulated a wide and varied amount of evidence 
in favour of the view which I here propound, 
namely, that there is a most highly evolved type of 
woman in our midst. This type, which it will be 
agreed is the most valuable we possess, encompasses 
women of a wide range of potentialities ; they have 
beautiful entirely feminine bodies, with all femin- 
ine and womanly instincts well developed, with a 

1 66 



EVOLVING TYPES OP WOMEN 

normal, indeed a rather strong, sex instinct and 
acute personal desires which tend to be concen- 
trated on one man and one man alone. I will 
provisionally call this the late maturing type, for 
such a woman is generally incapable of real sex 
experience till she is about twenty-seven or thirty. 
I think that she is in line with the highest branch 
of our evolution, that she represents the present 
flower of human development, and that through 
her and her children the human race has the best 
hope of evolving on to still higher planes — but, and 
this is very important, she is not fitted for marriage 
until she is at least twenty-seven, probably later, 
her best childbearing years may be after she is 
thirty-five, and her most brilliant and gifted child- 
ren are likely to be born when she is about forty. 

Personal evidence, and also facts in the interest- 
ing letters sent me by my readers have brought to 
my knowledge the existence of an important pro- 
portion of women who are absolutely conscious of 
no personal localized sex feeling until they are 
nearly or over thirty — one woman was nearly 
fifty before she felt and knew the real meaning of 
sex union though many years married. 

From personal observation of the general 
167 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

physique of such of these women as I have seen 
face to face, I may say that, as a rule, they retain 
their youth long ; they retain also a buoyancy and 
vitality which, if they are properly treated, and 
have the good fortune to be married at the right 
time to the right man, may remain with them al- 
most throughout their lives. Such women not 
only prolong their girlhood, they defer their age. 
Such women have, of course, throughout the cen- 
turies appeared from time to time, and I fancy have 
generally in the past, and still often in the present, 
suffered acutely through marrying too young. 
When they marry too young, they tend, by the 
forcing of their feelings, by the deadening through 
habit of their potentialities, by the trampling on 
the unfolded possibilities within them to be turned 
artificially into a "cold type of woman." 

Women, now older, tell me of the fact that for 
the first years of their married life they could give 
no response, but when they were respectively 
twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, or more, they be- 
gan first to feel they were truly women. Young 
husbands have written to me of their distress that 
their wives (aged about twenty to twenty- three) , 
delightful girls in every respect, seemed utterly 

1 68 



EVOLVING TYPES OF WOMEN 

incapable of any response in the marital orgasm. 
Sometimes this depends on her conformation, but 
.such an incapacity I often attribute to the girl's 
marriage being premature. When she is twenty- 
seven or twenty-eight perhaps her internal develop- 
ment will be complete, and she will then be ripe for 
the full enjoyment of marriage : but, if instead of a 
considerate husband, she marries one who merely 
uses her, she stands little chance ever of knowing 
the proper relation of wifehood and motherhood. 

These facts which I could vary with details from 
individual experiences, in my opinion, indicate a 
profound truth in the development of the human 
race. It is this: not only do the higher races of 
human beings have a prolonged childhood and 
youth, but the most highly evolved, mentally, 
physically, and racially, of our girls have not 
finished their potential growth into maturity until 
they are in the neighbourhood of thirty years of 
age. 

Does this then mean that all marriage should be 
deferred till so late? By no means, nor is. the 
above conclusion any reflection on the type of girl 
who ripens much more quickly. I fully recognize 
that, from the point of view of their sex potentiali- 

169 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

ties, some girls are complete women at seventeen or 
eighteen, and that they may then be very strongly 
sexed indeed. Such women should marry young. 

The marked differentiation of type of these 
very notably different women can be traced 
through many other aspects of their lives, and it is 
my opinion that, for instance, the type of whom I 
spoke in Chapter XII, who has a natural desire for 
union, representing the highest and most complex 
human union, the union of three, belongs very 
frequently to the late maturing, and, as I consider, 
the most highly evolved form of femininity. 

It should be recognized that there are among 
us not only different races, but that in the same 
stock, sometimes in the. same family of apparently 
no specially mixed ancestry, we may find one or 
more members of the late maturing, others of the 
early maturing type. Sometimes of two sisters, 
the elder may perhaps be still in mind a girl while 
her younger sister is a woman, as can be observed 
by any one with a large circle of acquaintances. 
It would be well, I think, if humanity, whose 
proper study is mankind, were at least to know 
themselves sufficiently well to realize the existence 
of such different types, and their possible potential 

170 



EVOLVING TYPES OF WOMEN 

value as well as their differing needs. The energy 
at present spent in the acrid statement of conflict- 
ing views would be so much better spent on the 
careful recording and recognizing of varying types. 

The advice to marry young, which is in every 
respect socially wise and physiologically correct 
for some, should not be hurled indiscriminately at 
all women, because for the late maturing such 
advice is socially disadvantageous and physiolog- 
ically wrong. 

I am now ready to consider the question of the 
proper age for motherhood about which an im- 
mense variety of opinion is expressed. The 
general tendency has been, even in the last few 
years, to raise the age at which a girl may marry, 
and to raise the age, which the medical profession 
advises as the earliest suitable, for motherhood. 
But still one often hears of elders, whom one would 
in other respects like to follow, advising the early 
bearing of children. 

Now I should like every potential parent to 
consider what type of child they want. Do they 
want to secure healthy, jolly little animals with 
no more brains than are sufficient to see them 
creditably through life? If so, let them have their 

171 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

children very early. Such healthy sound people 
with no special gifts are valuable, and there is 
much work in the world for them to do. On the 
other hand, do they want to take the risk for their 
child of a possibly less robust body, but with the 
possibility, indeed, in healthy families, almost the 
certainty, of an immensely greater brain power, 
and a more strongly developed temperament? 
Then, let them have their children late. And, if 
a man desires to have a child who may become 
one of the master minds whose discoveries, whose 
artistic creations, whose ruling power stamps itself 
upon the memory of our race, whose name is 
handed down the ages, then let the father who 
desires such a child mate himself with the long- 
young late-maturing type of woman I have just 
described, and let her bear that child some time 
between the age of thirty-five and forty-five. 

How often one hears some version of the phrase : 
"Yes, it is so sad, poor, dear Lord So-and-So, a 
charming man, but no brains at all; his younger 
brother such a brilliant man; but that is always 
the way, the eldest sons in the aristocracy do seem 
to get the gift of property balanced by the lack of 
brains." Now I enquire, and I should like my 

172 



EVOLVING TYPES OF WOMEN 

readers to enquire into the secret of this phe- 
nomenon, which is by no means universal, but is 
sufficiently common to be endorsed. In my opin- 
ion, the interpretation of this fact is that the earlier 
children were born when the mother was still too 
young to endow them with brains, particularly if 
the mother was one of the gifted and cultivated 
women of the late-maturing type. 

This also leads me to consider another generality 
which is frequently used as an argument by those 
who oppose conscious and deliberate parenthood. 
Some people say that by the direct control of the 
size of the family to a small limited number which 
the parents definitely desire, we would be eliminat- 
ing genius from our midst, and their argument runs : 
Look at Nelson, he was a fifth son; look at Sir 
Walter Scott, he was a third son; and so on. This 
to the uncritical seems conclusive, and many 
people of great capacity, ideals, and heart, who 
otherwise would be wholly on my side in my claim 
that every child born shall be deliberately desired, 
and that all other conceptions shall be consciously 
prevented, are swayed by this argument and say: 
"Yes, your position would be obviously the right 
one for the race if it were not that later children 

173 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

are so often the better.' ' I turn, therefore, to a 
consideration of the life histories of these men's 
mothers. Why was Nelson the genius of his 
family? Because his mother was too young to 
bear geniuses at the time she was bearing her elder 
children. But this is not yet a sufficiently accur- 
ate consideration of the subject; I want to know 
also of which type the mother was, for, in my 
opinion, the right age for the parenthood of a 
woman depends also on the type to which she be- 
longs, whether the early maturing or the late 
maturing. If she knows herself to be the latter, 
after it is patent, as it must become patent to every 
one once the idea is placed before them, that such 
women are in our midst, then that woman and 
her mate should usually defer parenthood until 
she has reached at least thirty years of age. If 
this were done, then not the fourth, fifth, or seventh, 
but the first child would stand a very great chance 
of being a world leader, a powerful mind, perhaps 
even a genius. First children have been geniuses 
(Sir Isaac Newton was an only child) ; all depends 
on the age, the conscious desire, the general type, 
and the surrounding conditions, during pre-natal 
state of her infant, of the mother who bears him, 

174 



EVOLVING TYPES OP WOMEN 

and the father from whom he also inherits poten- 
tialities. 

A few investigations bearing on the effect of the 
parent's age have been published by the Eugenics 
Society and some individuals, but none of these 
appear to me to be of any value, for none take into 
account the necessary data concerning the type 
of the mother which I here point out, and in all 
the calculations are crude errors. 

The best woman, with comparatively few ex- 
ceptions is already and will still more in the future 
be the woman who, out of a long, healthy, and 
vitally active life, is called upon to spend but a 
comparatively small porportion of her years in an 
exclusive subservience to motherhood. A woman, 
let us say, has seventy or eighty active years of 
life; if she bears three or perhaps four children, 
she will, even if she gives up all her normal activi- 
ties during the later months of pregnancy and the 
earlier of nursing, still have cut out of her life but 
a very small proportion of its total. She should, 
indeed, after she once is a mother, always devote 
a proportion of her energies to the necessary super- 
vision of her children's growth and education, but 
with the increasing number of schools and special- 

175 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

ists, nurses, teachers, and instructors of all sorts, 
the individual mother has much less of the purely- 
physical labour for her children than formerly. 
That this is not only so, but is approved by the 
State can be seen at once by imagining a working- 
class mother insisting on keeping her child at home 
all day under her personal supervision — the School 
Inspector would step in and take the child from her 
for a certain number of hours every day. But this 
book is primarily for middle and upper class women, 
and for them motherhood increasingly should 
mean a widening of their interests and occupations. 

The counter-idea still expressed, even by leading 
doctors and others, is that the whole capability of 
the individual mother should be devoted solely to 
contributing to her children. This is exemplified 
in the recent statement of Blair Bell: "A normal 
woman, therefore, would not exploit her capa- 
bilities for individual gain, but for the benefit of 
her descendants.' ' This view is a false one and is 
based on a narrow vision. 

This pictures an endless chain of fruitless lives, 
all looking ever to some supreme future consumma- 
tion which never materializes. By means of this 
perpetual sinking of woman's personality in a 

176 



EVOLVING TYPES OP WOMEN 

mistaken interpretation of her duty to the race, 
every generation is sacrificed in turn. The result 
has not been productive of good, happiness, or 
beauty for the majority. No; the individual 
woman, normal or better than the average should 
use her intellect for her own individual gain, for 
the achievement of individual creative work; not 
only because of its value to the age and community 
in which she lives, but also for the inheritance she 
may thus give her children, and so that when her 
children 'are grown up, they may find in their 
mother, not only the kind attendant of their youth, 
but their equal in achievement. With a woman of 
capacities perhaps still exceptional, but by no 
means so rare as some men writers would like to 
pretend, the pursuit of her work or profession and 
honourable achievement in it is not at all incom- 
patible with but is highly beneficial to her mother- 
hood. Az Charlotte Gilman says : 

No, the maternal sacrifice theory will not bear ex- 
amination. As a sex specialized to reproduction, 
giving up all personal activity, all honest independence, 
all useful and progressive economic service for her 
glorious consecration to the uses of maternity, the 
human female has little to show in the way of results 

177 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

which can justify her position. Neither by the 
enormous percentage of children lost by death, nor the 
low average health of those who survive, neither 
physical nor mental progress, give any proof to race 
advantage from the maternal sacrifice. — Women and 
Economics. 



i 7 8 



CHAPTER XVI 

BIRTH AND BEAUTY 

"Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers. 
Thou knowest how to wait. 
"Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small flower." 

Tagore: Gitanjali. 

WHEN all goes well and there is no acci- 
dental hastening of the birth by shock 
or jar which dislodges the child too 
soon, the birthday finds its place in the ordinary 
rhythm of the woman's existence. We speak 
generally of the "nine months" during which the 
child is borne by its mother, but this nine months 
is a fictitious number depending on our calendar 
months, and the developing child is actually ten 
lunar months within its mother. Just as the 
average almost universal period of the woman's 
rhythm has twenty-eight days' cycle, so on this 
number of days does the circle of months leading to 
the birth depend. Ten months of twenty-eight 

179 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

days each is the full period of development, at the 
close of which the child seeks its exit through birth. 
As a rule the day of birth corresponds to some ex- 
tent, if not quite accurately, to the former rhythm 
of her menstrual waves. 

An interesting paper containing various scien- 
tific data (not all of which are universally ac- 
cepted) is to be found in the Anat Anzeiger of 1897 
by Beard. What is actually the spring behind 
this rhythm is as yet largely unknown, but a recent 
work on the internal secretions from the ovary, 
such as described by Starling in the Croonian 
Lecture , 1905, who quotes Marshall and Jolly and 
other workers, appears to indicate that this func- 
tion like so many others in our system is due to the 
activities of certain glands which yield internal 
secretions, which, penetrating the whole system, 
have a controlling influence upon activities remote 
from their source. 

For the birth itself, the mother should be in 
competent hands, one who is experienced in all that 
has to be done in normal, healthy circumstances, 
and who can detect at once any necessity for spe- 
cialized help. If the mother has lived rightly and 
wisely, dieted as I suggest, and is properly formed, 

180 



BIRTH AND BEAUTY 

as, of course, should be assured through examina- 
tion some time before the birth is expected, the 
birth should be, however terrible an experience, 
yet one which is safely passed. 

In the days which follow she will have much to 
endure, and instead of the peace and quietness 
which she expected, she will find that she has con- 
stant disturbances, which are, however, incidental 
to the nursing of one who is, in essentials, a surgical 
case. 

Possibly due to the inconveniences involved in 
staying in bed, there is a tendency at present to 
encourage the mother to get up and at least walk 
about the room, and be up for an hour or two within 
ten days or less of the date of the birth. Almost 
every one with whom I have come in contact 
advises this, and in a certain school, particularly 
those who go in for what is called "Twilight Sleep,", 
there is not only an effort to get the mother up 
early, but a pride on the part of the mother and 
her advisers in getting her up perhaps within two 
or three days of the birth. 

Some women who have had a good many child- 
ren boast of how they are up and about in ten 
days. I glance critically at all who tell me that, 

181 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

examining both their figures and their general 
appearance. Only one woman of all who have ever 
discussed this matter with me urged the entirely old- 
fashioned month in bed following the birth. But, 
and this is very important, she was the only one who, 
having had many children, at the same time had done 
most notable and arduous brain work, and also re- 
tained her youthful figure and general appearance. 

This quite exceptional and old-fashioned advice 
is what I would hand on to women to-day. The 
modern craze for getting up quickly is absolutely 
wrong, and has a fundamental deleterious effect 
on the general health of our women. I should go 
so far as to say that not only should a woman stay 
in bed the entire month, but that she should for 
two weeks longer scarcely put her foot to the 
ground. She may lie out of doors or on sofas, but, 
after a birth, she should lie about for the whole of six 
weeks. 

This may startle my readers. I, who look so keen- 
ly into the future, who am so progressive, so modern, 
and so desirous of the great and rapid evolution 
of women, to return to the old custom of our grand- 
mothers, and demand, not only the month in bed, 
to ask even more, that there should be six weeks 

182 



BIRTH AND BEAUTY 

spent practically lying about all the time! Is 
this not an anachronism? No. It will be ob- 
served that throughout this and my other books, 
my advice always has a biological basis, depending 
on the actual structure or the history of our bodies, 
and there is a very profound and physiological 
basis for the advice I now give. It is this — that 
not only during the birth is the whole system of the 
mother to some extent jarred and shaken; she 
suffers in her nerves the sudden relief from the 
strain upon her muscles and in the whole readjust- 
ment of her system an extremely profound shock, 
and the treatment for shock entails rest. More 
than that, the womb which lies centrally and is so 
important an organ in her body, so enormously 
enlarged during the last months through which the 
child inhabited it, returns to its permanent size 
slowly; its strong, muscular walls tensely contract, 
but this contraction which reduces its size very 
much in the first day or two does not complete 
itself, does not bring the tissues back to the size 
which they will afterwards permanently maintain 
until six weeks have elapsed. For the whole of six 
weeks, therefore, the womb will be larger and 
heavier than normal and with a tendency to get 

183 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

out of place, while all the muscles of the body wall 
are weakened and out of condition by being so long 
stretched. A woman, therefore, should not put 
any strain on her muscles like standing or walking 
or taking any active exercise before the six weeks 
have elapsed, though she should, lying both on her 
back and on her face, do exercises calculated to 
restore the strength of these muscles and fit them 
to take on their work directly she rises. One 
exercise, particularly valuable and but little known 
is to raise the diaphragm without breathing. This 
can be done during the six weeks in bed, but is 
particularly valuable on first rising and standing 
or walking. This internal pull upwards of all the 
organs strengthens both the internal and the outer 
body wall muscles. Such control deliberately and 
frequently exerted throughout the day does more 
perhaps than any one other thing to retain a 
slender well-formed trunk. It has also a curiously 
bracing and exhilarating mental effect, and as the 
action can be done at any time unobserved, its 
effect can be utilized at will. The ancient Greeks 
laid great stress on the value of control of the 
diaphragm. 

It may be argued that during the time the child 
184 



BIRTH AND BEAUTY 

was within it, the womb was very much larger than 
it is after birth, and nevertheless then active walk- 
ing exercise was recommended. Yes: but during 
that time the womb was supported by the increased 
tension on the front muscles of the body wall 
against which it pressed, and was thus assisted in 
maintaining its position; but after birth, while it is 
so very much smaller than quite recently it has 
been, and, at the same time, while still much larger 
than normal, and more than the weakened internal 
muscles are prepared to support, it is no longer held 
firm by the tense body wall, for the body wall is 
now limp, crumpled and almost incapable of sup- 
porting any strain. If, therefore, the woman 
stands too soon, the inner organs which are again 
beginning to find their natural place — the long 
digestive tract and other organs — tend to flop 
downwards, to bulge out the still loose and strained 
abdominal muscles, and press the still too heavy 
womb out of its normal position, the position to 
which it must return, and must permanently take 
up if the woman is to have her general health 
maintained throughout the rest of her life. Hence, 
before she sets foot to the ground, she must lie 
the nature-decreed six weeks, and meanwhile 

185 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

exercise the abdominal muscles so as to prepare 
them to act properly. 

When I see, and hear of, women either forced 
or lured or eagerly getting out of bed in ten days or 
a week after childbirth, I wonder what will have 
happened to those women ten or fifteen years hence. 
They will be fortunate if they do not have what is 
now so increasingly prevalent, namely some form of 
displacement of the womb with all its attendant 
miseries of handicapped motherhood and wifehood. 
I maintain that it is nothing short of cruelty and 
criminality to allow the modern woman to get 
up quickly in the way she does. It may possibly 
be verified by some of the foolish and hardy 
pioneers of getting up rapidly, that when she is a 
middle-aged or elderly woman she will not be 
suffering from the slow relaxations and displace- 
ments which result from putting pressure too soon 
on abdominal muscles unprepared to bear the 
strain. This will not make things safe for the 
average woman however. It is not realized how 
appalling is the prevalence of womb displacements 
among the lower working-class women, those who 
are forced by circumstances to get up in a week or 
ten days and go back to work. I think the modern 

186 



BIRTH AND BEAUTY 

increase in displacements in middle and upper 
class women is partly to be traced to the tendency 
to get up too soon, and also is to the impatient 
practitioner's use of instruments to hasten a birth 
which would come naturally in good time. When 
once the perineal and inner supporting muscles 
have been torn, they are too often mended super- 
ficially, but inner tears are left which make the 
perineum an insufficient support for the womb, of 
which the result is its slow and gradual dropping 
out of place, which some years afterwards may 
acutely handicap the unfortunate woman. 

In the name of all the fond and radiant mothers 
that I hope the future may contain, I would urge 
every one who possibly can to insist on having six 
weeks of ' 'lying in." This is not only in the inter- 
ests of general health but of beauty. Too long 
have we become tolerant of, even so accustomed to 
it, that we do not observe the hideous formation of 
the body which is common in older women. We 
have domesticated some animals 1 solely for our 
own purposes, and they are hideous indeed. Why 
should we women permit a comparable standard 

x The sow normally breeding once a year, artificially forced to 
breed two or. three times a year. Its appearance is proverbial. 

187 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

for ourselves ? Why not insist on at least as much 
care as is devoted to the race-horse? Why not 
take a period of rest after the great effort of 
maternity proportionately as long as a she-wolf or 
tigress takes in her cave, fed by her mate while she 
lies about and plays with her cubs ? ■ The standard 
of beauty of the racing mare, of the wild tigress or 
she-wolf is slender and not markedly different from 
that of its virgin state. Such a standard, and not 
that of the over-taxed, man-used, domesticated 
animals should be that on which we should insist. 

In this connection should be mentioned one other 
way in which the following of Nature and obedi- 
ence to her law works for good. In the following 
chapter, I mention the baby's right to be fed by 
nature's food, and while the infant is nursing from 
its mother, it stimulates contractions in the womb 
which very much assist in bringing it to its right 
size and position, and so the act of nursing benefits 
not only the infant but its mother. 

A number of researches by various experts have 
been made, which proves that the womb reacts 
to the stimulus of suckling by the child. Pfister 

1 This has been reported to me by travellers and others, but 
I cannot get an authoritative scientific record for the fact. 



BIRTH AND BEAUTY 

(Beit. z. Geb. u. Gyn., 1901, vol. v, p. 241) for in- 
stance, found that very definite contractions took 
place during the baby's suckling, particularly for 
the first eight days after its birth ; also Temesvary 
(Journ. Obstet. and Gyn. Brit. Emp. f 1903, vol. iii, 
p. 511) found that the natural involution of the 
womb after birth was distinctly more rapid in 
those who nursed their babies than in those who 
did not. 

Prolonging the nursing period does undoubtedly 
not tend to increase the beauty of the woman's 
bosom but to deteriorate it, but, for at any rate 
the first few months, it is very advantageous both 
to the mother and to the child that she should feed 
it naturally. If throughout the nursing period she 
slings her breast properly from above, and if when 
nursing period ceases she massages and treats the 
breast properly, it should not lose its beauty in the 
way which to-day, too often, we see its loveliness 
destroyed. 

Mothers, in the self-sacrifice involved in their 
motherhood, too often forget their duty to remain 
beautiful. All youth is revolted by ugliness, 
consciously or unconsciously. A girl should not 
be indirectly taught to dread motherhood her- 

189 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

self by seeing the wreckage her own mother has 
allowed it to make of her. A high demand for 
beauty of form in mothers is not sefishness but 
a racial duty. 



190 



CHAPTER XVII 
baby's rights 

"The nation that first finds a practical reconcilation between 
science and idealism is likely to take the front place among the 
peoples of the world." 

Dean Inge: Outspoken Essays. 

BABY'S rights are fundamental. They are: 
To be wanted. 

To be loved before birth as well as after 
birth. 

To be given a body untainted by any heritable 
disease, uncontaminated by any of the racial 
poisons. 

To be fed on the food that nature supplies, or, 
if that fails, the very nearest substitute that can be 
discovered. 

To have fresh air to breathe; to play in the 
sunshine with his limbs free in the air; to crawl 
about on sweet clean grass. 
When he is good, to do what baby wants to do 
191 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

and not what his parents want; for instance, to 
sleep most of his time, not to sit up and crow in 
response to having his cheeks pinched or his sides 
tickled. 

When he is naughty, to do what his parents 
want and not what he wants : to be made to under- 
stand the "law of the jungle." From his earliest 
days he must be disciplined in relation to the great 
physical facts of existence, to which he will always 
hereafter have to bow. The sooner he compre- 
hends this, the better for his future. 

Most young mothers, even those who have had 
the advantage of highly trained maternity nurses 
to assist them at first, later require authoritative 
advice about how to treat the baby for whom they 
have given so much, and to whom they wish to 
give every possible advantage. Many books give 
advice to the young mother and to these she may 
turn. I do not wish to duplicate what they say, 
but advise every one who has an infant, even if 
she thinks she knows all about the best method of 
bringing it up, to possess a copy of Dr. Truby 
King's Baby and How to Rear It for reference. It 
is the most practical, sensible, and best illustrated 
book of its kind. 

192 



BABY'S RIGHTS 

There is, therefore, on the subject of baby's 
material rights not very much more that I need 
to say, but there is one elementary right very 
generally overlooked, and that is the right to love 
in anticipation. 

Baby's right to be wanted is an individual right 
which is of racial importance. No human being 
should be brought into the world unless his parents 
desire to take on the responsibility of that new life 
which must, for so long, be dependent upon them. 

Far too many of the present inhabitants of this 
earth who are not wanted because of their inferi- 
ority, were children who came to reluctant, per- 
haps horror-stricken, mothers. To this fact, I 
trace very largely the mental and physical aber- 
rations which are to-day so prevalent; to this also 
I trace the bitterness, the unrest, the spirit of strife 
and malignity which seem to be without precedent 
in the world at present. 

The warped and destructive impulse of revolu- 
tion which is sweeping over so many people at 
present must have its roots in some deep wrong. 

Revolution is not a natural activity for human 
beings. Though the revolutionary impulse has 
swept through sections of humanity many times 
13 193 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

in its history, it is essentially unnatural, an indica- 
tion of warping and poisoning, and a cause of 
further and perhaps irreparable damage. 

Happy people do not indulge in revolution. 
Happy people with a deep sense of underlying 
contentment and satisfaction in life may yet strive 
ardently to improve and beautify everything round 
them. They strive in the same direction as the 
main current of life — that is, the growth and un- 
folding of ever increasing beauty. The revolu- 
tionaries — bitter, soured, and profoundly unhappy 
— pit their strength against the normal stream of 
life and destroy, break down, and rob. Too long 
humanity has had to endure such outbreaks owing 
to its general blindness and lack of understanding 
of their causes. 

Until the scientific spirit of profound inquiry 
into fundamental causes becomes general, even in 
a small section of the community, superficial and 
apparently obvious explanations are accepted for 
results which really arise from profound and secret 
springs. 

The "Divine discontent* ' which has impelled 
humanity forward along the path of constructive 
progress is a very different thing from the bitter 

194 



BABY'S RIGHTS 

discontent which leads to revolutionary and 
destructive outbursts. The village blacksmith of 
the well-known song, using his healthy muscles on 
hard, useful work which gives him a deep physical 
satisfaction, may feel the former and help forward 
the stream of progress in his village. 

The aim of reformers to-day should be to provide 
for every one neither ease nor comfort, nor high 
wages nor short hours, but the deeper necessities of 
a full and contented life, bodies able to respond 
with satisfaction to the strain of hard work per- 
formed under conditions which satisfy the mind in 
the most fundamental way of all — the deep, sub- 
conscious satisfaction which is given by the sweet 
smell of earth, by fresh air and sunshine, and green 
things around one. 

We draw from all these things some subtle 
ingredient without which our natures are weakened 
so that a further strain sends them awry. To-day 
we are so deeply involved with the hydra-headed 
monster of the revolutionary spirit that there does 
not seem time to deal with it radically, to attempt 
to understand it, and consequently to conquer it for 
ever. Even now, when for the first time humanity 
is on a large scale beginning to tackle fundamental 

195 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

problems, I have seen no indication that the source 
of revolution is being sought for in the right place. 

What is the source of revolution ? 

The revolutionaries through the ages, feeling 
themselves jar with their surroundings, have 
been ensnared by the nearest obvious things, the 
happier surrounding of others. These they have 
endeavoured to snatch at and destroy, thinking 
thereby to improve their own and their comrades' 
lot. Their deductions, though profoundly false, 
have appeared even obviously right to many. 

External grievances are what the revolutionary 
is out to avenge: external benefits are what he is 
out to gain. Generally this is expressed in terms 
of higher wages, a share or all of the capital of 
those supposed to be better off, or the material 
possessions of others. These are the things that 
nearly all strikers and revolutionaries are upsetting 
the world to get, thinking — perhaps sincerely — 
that these things will give them the happiness for 
which, consciously or unconsciously, they yearn. 
The truth is, however, that it is a much more in- 
timate thing than money or possessions which they 
need. They need new bodies and new hearts. 

Most of the revolutionaries I have met are people 
196 



BABY'S RIGHTS 

who have been warped or stunted in their own 
personal growth. One sees upon their minds or 
bodies the marks and scars of dwarfing, stunting, or 
lack of balance. They have known wretchedness, 
both in themselves and in their families, far more 
intimate and penetrating than that of mere poverty. 
That, they may answer, is an external grievance 
which has been imposed upon them by society. 
In effect they say: " Society has starved us, given 
us bad conditions. " Thus they foster a grievance 
against " society' ' in their minds. One bitter 
leader said to me: 

I was one of fourteen children, and my mother had 
only a little three-roomed cottage near Glasgow. We 
nearly starved when I was young. I know what the 
poor suffer at the hands of society. 

But it was not society that put fourteen children 
into that cottage; it was the mother herself. Her 
own ignorance, helpless ignorance perhaps, was 
the source of her children's misery. The most for 
which society can be blamed concerning that 
family is in tolerating such a plague-spot of ignorance 
in its midst. Nor is this pestilential ignorance by 
any means confined only to the financially poor. 

197 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

This country, and nearly all the world, has 
innumerable homes in which the seed of revolution 
is sown in myriads of minds from the moment they 
are conceived. Revolted, horror-stricken mothers 
bear children whose coming birth they fear. 

A starved, stunted outlook is stamped upon their 
brains and bodies in the most intimate manner 
before they come into the world, so oriented to- 
wards it that they must run counter to the healthy, 
happy constructive stream of human life. 

What wonder at the rotten conditions of our 
population when these are common experiences of 
the mothers of our race: 

For fifteen years I was in a very poor state of health 
owing to continual pregnancy. As soon as I was over 
one trouble it was started all over again. 1 

Again : 

During pregnancy I suffered much. When at the 
end of ten years I determined that this state of things 
should not go on any longer. 

Again : 

My grandmother had twenty children. Only eight 

1 1 refer the reader to that poignant book, Maternity Letters 
from Working Women , collected by the Women's Co-operative 
Guild. Bell, 1915. 

198 



BABY'S RIGHTS 

lived to about fourteen years; only two to a good old 
age. 

Again: 

I cannot tell you all my sufferings during the time of 
motherhood. I thought, like hundreds of women to- 
day, that it was only natural, and that you had to bear it. 
I had three children and one miscarriage in three years. 

Need I go on? 

There lies the real root of revolution. 

The secret revolt and bitterness which permeates 
every fibre of the unwillingly pregnant and suffer- 
ing mothers has been finding its expression in the 
lives and deeds of their children. We have been 
breeding revolutionaries through the ages and at an 
increasing rate since the crowding into cities be- 
gan, and women were forced to bear children be- 
yond their strength and desires in increasingly 
unnatural conditions. 

Also since women have heard rumours that 
such enslaved motherhood is not necessary, that 
the wise know a way of keeping their motherhood 
voluntary, the revolt in the mother has become 
conscious with consequent injury to the child. 

Increasingly, the first of baby's rights is to be 
wanted. 

199 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

Concerning baby's right to be fed on the food 
that nature supplies, or if that fails, the very 
nearest substitute that can be discovered, there 
are to-day so many who urge that an infant shall 
be fed by its own mother, that it is perhaps needless 
to repeat arguments so impressive. Nevertheless, 
perhaps it is as well to remind young mothers of 
two or three of the most vital facts. The first is 
that no artificial substitute, however perfectly 
prepared and chemically analyzed, can possibly 
give those very subtle constituents which are 
found in the mother's own milk, and which vary 
from individual to individual. These probably 
are in the nature of the vitamines now so well 
known in fresh food, but they are something more 
specifically individual than can be scientifically 
detected. The fresh milk of its own mother has a 
peculiar value to the child which is greater than 
that of any foster mother. 

For this reason alone, were it the only one, every 
young mother should nurse her own baby, if 
possible; but, on the other hand, to-day it not 
infrequently happens that the mother may have 
an apparent flow of milk, quite sufficient for the 
infant in quantity, but that milk may be devoid of 

200 



BABY'S RIGHTS 

the necessary supply of fat or sugars or some other 
ingredient for complete nutriment. When this is 
so, it is often wisest to allow the mother to nurse 
the child partly and to supplement its diet by 
other milk. 

Various schools of doctors and materntiy nurses 
have differed even on this matter, but it is quite 
obvious that if the actual food value of the mother's 
milk is below a certain point, then the added value of 
its individual vitamine-like qualities will not wholly 
compensate for the loss of actual nourishment. 

Among baby's rights, I should perhaps also 
make it clear that there is his right that he should 
not be used as a bulwark between his mother and 
another baby in a way which is sometimes recom- 
mended, so that a mother may go on nursing her 
infant for a very long time, sometimes even into 
its second year, in the hope that this nursing may 
prevent her conceiving again. Such a course of 
action is very harmful both to the child and to her, 
and should never be followed. Such a practice is, 
of course, much less common in this country (ex- 
cept among aliens) than it is abroad where I have 
seen healthy children of even three or four years of 
age nursing upon their mother's knees. 

201 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

In these days, perhaps it is hardly necessary 
to accentuate baby's other rights since the century 
of the child dawned a generation ago. To-day it 
is perhaps almost more important to accentuate 
the rights of others who exist in the neighbourhood 
of a baby. But, on the other hand, if one looks 
penetratingly at the whole problem of character 
development, one sees that among baby's rights 
is its right to be trained from the very first so that 
its life shall be as little hindered by friction as may 
be possible, that it should be taught the elemen- 
tary rules of conduct and necessary conformity 
with the hard material facts of existence from the 
very first. A wise nurse's or mother's training 
from the earliest weeks of infancy may make or mar 
a future man's or woman's chance of getting on in 
the world and making a success of their lives, by 
making or marring the character, the capacity to 
obey, the formation of regular and hygienic habits, 
and the realization of the physical facts of the 
world. 

The ancient Greeks taught their youth to 
reverence that which was beneath them, that which 
was around them, and that which was above them. 
In my opinion, this right of youth to be placed in 

202 



BABY'S RIGHTS 

its proper orientation in relation to the world has 
been neglected of late. We are suffering from the 
swing of the pendulum in revolt for an earlier and 
perhaps harsher type of mistake, that of too greatly 
controlling and thwarting the child's impulses. 
We must maintain a just balance and swing back 
to the due mean in which the right of a child, not 
only to be well born but well trained, is universally 
recognized. 



203 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE WEAKEST LINK IN THE HUMAN CHAIN 

"This shall be thy reward — that the ideal shall be real to 
thee." 

Olive Schreiner: Dreams. 

PROVERBS innumerable and daily experi- 
ence have familiarized every one with 
the idea that the citizen is moulded and 
his or her essential characteristics determined in 
childhood, and as a result of childhood's training. 
The most profoundly operative of all his qualities 
is his potential sex attitude, because it is that which 
determines his experience of sex and marriage, 
which colours his thoughts towards women 
throughout his life, which inclines his mind nobly 
towards his own racial actions, or which leaves him 
weak and frivolous in his attitude towards the 
greatest profundities of life. 

Children, otherwise brought up with every 
care and forethought, surrounded by all that love 

204 



WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN 

and money can give them, are too generally left, 
without their mother's guidance or their father's 
wisdom, to discover the great facts of life partly by 
instinct and partly from the vulgar talk of servants 
or soiled children a little older than themselves. 
Worse even than this takes place, because most 
generally in this connection, they not only do not 
hear the truth from their mother's lips, but they 
learn from her their most influential and earliest 
lesson in lying. 

The curious thing about the particularly per- 
nicious form of lying which deals with racial things 
in the presence of childhood is that we have the 
habit of thinking it quite innocent. Indeed we 
have even acquired the habit of thinking it one of 
the charming form of lies; hence when we are in 
a reforming mood, seeking for the origins of the 
wrongs we are trying to put right, we pass these 
" charming' ' lies by, thinking them harmless. 

Where did each one of us first learn to lie? 

Nearly every one who is now grown up got his 
{or her) first lesson in lying at his mother's knee. 
To the little child, in his narrow but ever widen- 
ing world, the mother is the supreme ruler, the 
all-wise provider of food, clothes, pleasures, and 

203 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

pains. The mother (the child instinctively feels) 
must be also the source of wisdom. 

Question after question about himself and his 
surroundings spring up in the baby mind. Mother 
is asked them all, and for every one she has some 
sort of an answer. Then inevitably, at three or 
four, or five years old comes the question: 
11 Mother, where did you find me? " — M Mother, how 
was I born?" 

Then comes the lie. 

The child is told about the doctor bringing him 
in a bag — or a stork flying in through the window — 
or the accidental finding under the gooseberry 
bush. 

All children delight in fairy tales, and instinc- 
tively they know very well the difference between 
a fairy tale which is recounted to them as a story 
in answer to their mood of " make-believe/ ' and a 
fiction which is putting them off when they are 
seeking the truth. 

If the mother who feels herself too ignorant or 
too self-conscious to answer the truth to the child's 
questions takes him on her knee and deliberately 
tells him in a " make-believe" mood a fairy tale, 
the child will then not feel that the mother has lied. 

206 



WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN 

He will feel, however, that he must ask someone else 
for the truth. 

But most mothers give the answer containing 
the fiction of the gooseberry bush, or whatever it 
may be, in a manner indicating that that is what 
the child must believe, and the child receives the 
information as a serious answer to his serious 
question. It is then a lie, and a pernicious lie. 

Racial knowledge, instinct, whatever you like 
to call it, is subtler and stronger in baby minds 
than we dulled grown-ups are inclined to think. 
The youngest child has a half-consciousness that 
what its mother said in answer to this question 
was not true. 

Nurse, or auntie, a friend's governess, or any 
one else who seems wise and powerful, is asked the 
same question when mother is not there, and the 
chances are that if mother had given the stork 
version, auntie gives the gooseberry bush or some 
other fiction which she particularly favours. 

The baby ponders intermittently, inconsequent- 
ly, perhaps at long intervals, perhaps after years, 
but ultimately it realizes that its mother lied to it. 

In this way, infinite injury has been done to 
the whole human stock, and more particularly 

207 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

women have suffered from the dishonesty and 
the inherent incapacity of our society to be frank 
and truthful about the most profound and the 
most terrible aspects of sex, viz., its diseases. A 
wife or a mother has the right to be told the truth. 

Women, and particularly mothers, have been 
outrageously wronged by the deliberate lies and 
untruthful atmosphere about the greater problems 
of sex in which the learned have enshrouded them: 
but mothers have themselves given the first bend 
to the little sprouting twig of that tree of know- 
ledge, and they have bent it away from the sun- 
light of truth and clean and happy understanding. 

The mother's excuse is, or would be if she felt 
herself in any way to blame (which, by the way, 
deplorably, she very seldom does), that these 
terrible mysteries of origin are not suitable for the 
little innocent child to ponder over. She thinks 
they would shock him. But here the mother is 
profoundly mistaken. 

The age of innocence is the age when all knowledge 
is pure. At three, four, or five years old, every- 
thing is taken for granted — everything in the 
universe is equally a surprise, and is at the same 
time accepted without question as being in the 

208 



WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN 

natural course of events. If true answers were 
given to the tiny child's questions, they would 
seem quite rational — not in the least more surpris- 
ing than the fact that oak trees grow from acorns, 
or that the cook gets a jam tart out of a hot oven. 

All the world's events seem magic at that age, 
and if no exceptional mystery were made of the 
magic of his own advent, the child would feel it as 
natural as all the rest, and having asked the ques- 
tion and obtained satisfactory, simple unaccen- 
tuated answers, would let his little mind run on to 
the thousand other questions he wants to ask. 
The essential racial knowledge would slip naturally 
and sweetly into his mind mingled with a myriad 
other new impressions. 

There is no self-consciousness, no personal 
shamef acedness, about a tiny child. It accepts the 
great truths of the universe in the grand manner. 

If the mother has never failed her child, has 
always given it what she could of wisdom, she 
will retain his trust and his confidence. When 
he gets a little older she can teach him to go to no 
one else for talk about the intimacies of life, which 
the child is quick to realize are not discussed openly 
amongst strangers. 

14 209 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

Then, later on, when personal consciousness 
and shyness begins, there need not be the acute 
constraint and tension of the shame-faced elder 
speaking to a mind awakening to itself. Deep 
in the child's consciousness, deeper even than its 
conscious memory goes, the true big facts are 
planted. 

Mothers have suffered most from the lies 
rampant in the world ; but mothers have the great- 
est responsibility for the origin of those lies. 

Little realizing what they are doing when, think- 
ing to shield their innocent children from know- 
ledge, they have given the first bent of untruth, of 
shamefacedness to the human mind inquiring into 
those very subjects most needing to be handled 
with nobility and truthfulness. 

To tell a child of twelve or fourteen the truth 
is, for most parents, an impossibly difficult matter. 
The reason for this is that it is then too late for 
essentials; only details are then suitable or neces- 
sary. 

Little children spend much of their early time 
in exploring themselves and their immediate sur- 
roundings — all is mysterious, all at first unknown. 
Their own feet and hands, their powers of locomo- 

210 



WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN 

tion and of throwing some object to a distance, 
the curls of their own hair, the pain they encounter 
in their bodies when explorations bring them in 
contact with sharp angles: all are equally myster- 
ious, together forming a wonder-world. And 
babies are very young indeed when they explore 
with all the rest of their bodies, the rudiments of 
those of their racial organs with which they can 
acquaint themselves. In my opinion, the attitude 
of a man or woman through life is largely determined 
by the attitude adopted by the mother towards the 
racial organs before the child was old enough con- 
sciously to remember any instruction that was 
imparted. 

Advice is often given in these more enlightened 
days to instruct your boy or girl in his racial power 
or duties when he or she is ten or twelve years old. 
This to many seems very young, and they hesitate 
and defer it till they are older and "can understand 
better." In my opinion, this is already eight or 
ten years too late. 

The child's first instruction in its attitude towards 
its sex organs, its first account of the generation of 
human beings, should be given when it is two or three 
years old; given with other instruction, of which 

211 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

it is still too young to comprehend more than part, 
but which it is nevertheless old enough to compre- 
hend in part. Very simple instruction given 
reverently at suitable opportunities at that early 
age will impress itself upon the very texture of the 
child's mind, before the time of actual memories, 
so that from the very first possible beginnings its 
tendencies are in the direction of truth and rever- 
ent understanding. 

A child so tiny will usually not remember one 
word of what was said to it, but the effects on his 
outlook will be deep. For at that early age, children 
are meditatively absorbing, and being impressed 
by, the psychological states and feelings of their 
instructors and companions, and if, in these very 
earliest months, the mother or guardian makes the 
mistake of treating ribaldly the tiny organs, or of 
speaking lightly in the child's presence, or of di- 
rectly lying to the child about these facts, that 
child receives a mental warp and injury which 
nothing can ever eradicate entirely, which may in 
later years through bitter and befouling experiences 
be lived down as an old scar that has healed, but 
which will have permanently injured it. 

I hold this to be a profound truth, and one 

212 



WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN 

which it is urgent that humanity should realize. 
I trust that my view will establish itself on every 
hand. If that were my way, I could easily write 
a whole volume on the theme, and coin a poly- 
syllabic terminology in which to mould and harden 
thought on the subject. But I prefer that a few 
simple words should slip like vital seed into the hearts 
of mothers, and that they may mould the race. 

It is ignorance of this truth which has led to the 
dishonouring and befouling of pure and beautiful 
youth, which is the original source of the greater 
part of all the social troubles and the sex difficulties 
of adolescence. 

The tiny child of two or three years old, just 
beginning to perceive and piece together the psycho- 
logical impressions stamped upon it by its environ- 
ment and the mind-states of those around it, is the 
weakest link in the chain of our social consciousness. 
Physically, the new born babe for the first few 
days of its life is the weakest link in the chain, 
the most liable physically to extinction, but 
spiritually, socially, the link most liable to warp- 
ing, even destruction, is the awakening mind, the 
still half-sleeping consciousness, of the child be- 
tween two and three years old. 

213 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

The mother or guardian then who desires her 
son or daughter to face the great facts of life 
beautifully and profoundly should begin from the 
first to mould that attitude in the child. It may 
appear to the unthinking like building castles in the 
sand even to hint at truths which it cannot com- 
prehend to a child who in later years remembers 
nothing of the words used. This is not so. What 
the child absorbs is less the actual words than the 
tone of voice, the mode of expression that spiritu- 
ally impresses itself upon its own little soul. 

Then there comes a later stage for most civilized 
human beings, usually after they are three years 
old, when there arises the possibility of permanent 
consciousness through permanent and specific 
memory of things seen, done, or heard. Most 
grown-ups of the present generation will have some 
vivid memory, dating back to when they were 
between three and four years old, when they re- 
ceived a strong mental impression that grown-ups 
were lying to them, or that there was something 
funny or silly in questions which they asked. Per- 
haps they noticed that whilst Jack the Giant Killer 
was taken seriously, questions about where pussy 
got her kittens were laughed at. Almost each one of 

214 



WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN 

us who is to-day grown up then received some griev- 
ous injury. This time is of great importance in the 
psychology not only of the child, but of the whole 
adult race arising from the growing up of each child, 
for one's earliest memories are few but very vivid. 
As things are to-day, generally between the ages of 
three and four or so, in the months which are likely 
to yield a life-long memory, the spirit is wounded. 

When as a mother or father you are with your 
children, it is vital to be most careful to answer 
truly, and if possible beautifully the questions 
which arise. No one can foresee which question 
and answer may make that terrible impression 
which lasts for a life-time. 

When your little son or daughter is about the 
age of three or four or five, the day will come when 
you are asked questions about the most funda- 
mental facts in human life, and then the answers 
to these questions contain the probability of a life- 
long memory. Answer with the truth. 

Many parents are anxious to tell their children 
the great truths in a wise and beautiful manner. 
But few feel that they know how to do it, for it is a 
most difficult thing to know how to answer search- 
ing questions about profound subjects, and par- 

215 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

ticularly about those which the community 
wrongly considers shameful. Each mother knows, 
or should know, the temperament and needs of her 
child, so that the adaptation of the advice I give 
should be varied to suit the individual child. In 
essence, however, children's demands at an early 
age are remarkably similar, and the questions of 
children on birth and sex differ in form, though 
seldom in substance. 

The following conversation between a mother 
and her little son indicates what seems to me the 
best way to tell a child at the earliest stages, when 
he may have lasting memory of the facts that he is 
blindly seeking in his baby questions. It will not 
suffice to learn the answers off by heart; the baby 
will then soon confound his elders, but the sub- 
stance of the conversation should prove useful. 

The very first time the query comes: "Mother 
where did you get me?" the mother must not 
divert the child's interest, or hesitate, but should 
be ready at once to answer: 

"God and Daddy and I together made you, because 
we wanted you. ,,I 

x At the request of many readers this conversation was 
published in the Sunday Chronicle. 

216 



WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN 

" Did God help ? Couldn't He do it all Himself ? " 
"You know when you and I are playing with bricks 
together, you like Mummy to help, but not to do it all. 
God thought Daddy and Mummy would like Him to 
help, but not to do everything, because Daddy and 
Mummy enjoyed making you much more than you 
enjoy playing with bricks." 

That may suffice for the time, because little 
children are very readily satisfied with one or two 
facts about any one subject, and the talk could 
easily be diverted. The little mind may brood 
over what was told it, and some time later— per- 
haps a few days, perhaps even a few months or 
more _this question will come up again, possibly 
in a different form: 

"Mummy, when was I born?" 

The mother should give the day and say: 

"You know your birthday comes every year on the 
1 8th of April. That birthday is what reminds us of 
the day you were born, and each birthday you are a 
whole year older." 

"I'm five now." 

"Yes, so you were born five years ago on your birth- 
day." 

"Where was I before I was born? " 

217 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

" Don't you remember I told you that God and 
Daddy and I made you?" 

"Yes . . . Did you make me on my birthday ?" 

"Not all in one day; you took much longer to make 
than that." 

"How long did I take to make?" 

"A long, long time. Little children are so precious 
they cannot be made in a hurry." 

"How long did I take?" 

"Nearly a year — nine whole months." 

" Did baby take as long?" 

"Yes, just the same time. Baby is just as precious 
as you are." 

"I'm bigger." 

" Now you are, but you were baby's size when you 
were baby's age. You are bigger because you have 
grown since your first birthday." 

Again the subject may perhaps drop, or it may 
be carried directly forward. 

"What is being born?" 

" Being born is being shown to the world and seeing 
the world for the first time. At the end of nine months 
after God and Daddy and Mummy started to make 
you, you were ready to open your eyes and breathe 
and cry, and be a real live baby, and that day they 
showed you to somebody and you saw the world. 
That was being born." 

" Where was I before you finished making me?" 
218 



WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN 

14 Mummy kept you hidden away so that nobody at 
all should see you." 

"Where was I hidden?" 

" You were hidden in a most wonderful place, in the 
place where only quite little babies can be while God 
and their mummies are making them." 

' ' Show me; I want to go back there." 

"You can never go back; it is only while you are 
being made you can be there. After your first birth- 
day, you can never go back." 

"Where was I?" 

"Well, you know, little babies that are being made 
are very, very delicate, and they have to be kept very 
warm and comfortable, and nobody must see them, 
and they must be close, close up to their mummies." 

The child may interject, "And their daddies too?" 

"Yes, if they have got loving daddies, the daddy 
keeps close to the mummy; but while babies are being 
made it is God and mummy that have most of the 
work to do. That is why you must always love your 
mummies and obey them." 

The child may be temporarily satisfied, or may 
continue at once: 

"But where was it that I was while you were making 

me?" 

"What is the warmest, softest, safest place you can 
think of ? Mummy's heart : that is all warm with love. 
The place Mummy hid you while God and she were 
making you was right underneath her heart." 

219 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

"Her real heart — the heart that beats like a clock 
ticking ?" 

11 Yes, her real heart, just here." 

The mother should lay the child's hand on her 
heart and let him feel it beating. 

"And just inside, right underneath here, Mummy 
kept you while God was helping her to make you." 

The child who has been brought up in a home of 
love and tenderness and beauty will find this a 
thrilling and beautiful thought, like a little boy 
whom I know personally, and to whom this fact 
was told in this way. Solemnly, and without a 
word he went away from his mother into the middle 
of the room and stood deep in thought for several 
minutes. Then he turned, looked round, and 
rushed across the room, threw himself into his 
mother's lap, his arms round her neck and cried: 
"Oh, Mummy, Mummy, then I was right inside 
you." 

For days afterwards he was filled with a raptur- 
ous joy, and at times used to leave his play and 
come to his mother and put his arms round her 
neck, saying: "Oh, Mummy, that is why I love 
you so." 

220 



WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN 

Whatever form the child's feeling may take, 
the opportunity should not be allowed to pass 
without a little addition to the conversation, and 
the mother should say: 

" And you see that is why you must never talk to any 
one but Daddy and Mummy, or God through your 
prayers, about such things. As God and Daddy and 
Mummy, and no one else made your little body, so 
everything you want to know about it, all the ques- 
tions you want to ask, you should ask of them and no 
one else. You see, you are different from any other 
child in the world, and as Daddy and Mummy helped 
to make you, only they know your works. So what- 
ever it is you want to know, or whatever it is that goes 
wrong, it is Mummy and Daddy who can tell you 
about it." 

Once may be sufficient for a child to be told the 
greater truths it desires to know, but it is seldom 
that the child will leave so wonderful a subject 
entirely alone after first learning of it, and many 
portions of the beautiful facts will have to be 
repeated in a variety of forms, or in just the same 
words, as are repeated again and again the beloved 
fairy tales. The child, however, will be quick to 
know the difference between this story and fairy 
tales, for children have an instinct for truth at a 

221 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

much earlier age than grown-ups generally re- 
member. 

A further series of questions will probably arise 
when the child is about twelve. 

The essential difficulties of these later questions, 
and the shamefaced self-consciousness so usual 
between parent and child will never arise if from 
the first the deep truths have been known to the 
child. 

The child so instructed is not supplied with all 
necessary facts, and instruction of a more specific 
and exact nature will have to be repeated at further 
intervals throughout its life, but on this founda- 
tion, further knowledge can be built without hav- 
ing to wipe out anything already implanted, 
without having to contradict earlier instruction, or 
to acknowledge the gravest error of having lied. 
Life teaches much to a quick child trained to ob- 
servation, particularly in the country, where all 
children should spend much of their time, and if 
the little one has been told what has been given in 
the previous pages it will have all the essential 
facts there, and it will fit in for itself the other data 
which daily life will bring it ; thus it has garnered a 
harvest of facts one by one. 

222 



WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN 

Concerning the later instruction which will be 
necessary, the information can be given in many 
ways. Some advocate school instruction of child- 
ren of twelve or more in the physiology of all the 
members of the body, so that the racial powers are 
treated in their proper place in conjunction with 
the digestive organs, brain, lungs, etc. Some 
parents prefer to give the instruction themselves, 
for none but they can know so well the individual 
needs of the child. 

Much has already been written and is available 
in the voluminous literature about the subject of 
the facts to be imparted at the various later ages, 
and almost every book advises comparisons with 
flowers. For the later ages of ten years and after, 
this is probably the best introduction for specific 
details, but for the first and earliest instruction of 
the baby mind, such direct simple answers as I 
have indicated are, I am sure, the best. 

Children whose parents have treated them as I 
advise in this chapter are essentially safe whatever 
form later instruction may take. They will then 
have the vitality to survive lies, although ever to 
lie to them will be putting a cruel and useless 
strain on their recuperative powers. If the little 

223 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

child is started upon its life with a beautiful and 
true conception of its relation to its mother, and 
of man's relation to woman, it will be unlikely, 
indeed, that it will grow up a hooligan who flouts 
its parents or a loose and lascivious destroyer of 
women. 



224 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE COST OF COFFINS 

He only is free who can control himself. 



Epictetus. 



The imposition of motherhood upon a married woman in 
absolute despite of her health and of the interests of the children 
is none the less an iniquity because it has at present the approval 
of Church and State. 

Saleeby: Woman and Womanhood. 

WHY do poor slum mothers buy more 
coffins than do the same number of rich 
women? 
The incredulous may answer this question by 
asserting that they don't, but as a matter of fact 
they do. The Registrar-General's Report for 191 1 
shows that of every thousand births in the upper 
and middle classes, 76.4 babies die, while of a 
thousand births in the homes of unskilled work- 
men (this would be the class of the "poor" moth- 
ers) 152.5 babies die. 

So that it is clear that if each member of this 
15 225 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

poorest class of mothers had exactly the same 
number of babies as each mother of the rich class, 
she would have to purchase about two coffins for 
every coffin bought by those whose babies are not 
so prone to die- 

There is, however, another fact which completes 
the proof of my first sentence. The upper and 
middle classes do not have so many children per 
family as do the poorest class. Of a thousand 
married people in the upper and middle classes 
there were born in 1911, 119 babies, but to the poor 
mothers-— the wives of the unskilled workmen — 
there were born 213. So that in addition to buy- 
ing twice as many coffins per thousand children 
born, these poor mothers have nearly twice as 
many coffins again, owing to the fact that nearly 
twice as many children are born to them. 

I wonder if poor women have ever asked them- 
selves if they can afford coffins at this rate? 

Of course, the coffins of these poor little babies 
are very small, and do not require very much 
wood to make them. But let us think in what 
other ways they cost: To the mother they cost 
not only all the little baby had eaten, and used 
in the way of clothes before its death, but all the 

226 



THE COST OF COFFINS 

wastage of her own vitality while she was bearing 
it; she could not work so well, at any rate towards 
the end of the time. Home duties had to be some- 
what neglected; the older children had to go to 
school dirtier and less cared for; the husband had 
less comfort and fewer smiles; every one in the 
family was poorer, not only in material things and 
in the work that might make material things, but 
in happiness and buoyancy. 

It needs no imagination to realize, when you 
have once grasped these facts, that poor people are 
much less able to spare the cost of a doomed baby 
than are the better class people. Then why do 
they so often indulge in this tragic luxury? Chiefly 
through lack of knowledge, through ignorance, 
particularly on the part of the mother. 

Often, ignorance is blind and unaware that it 
is ignorance, stupidly blundering through life; 
but this is not always the mother's attitude. She 
may, indeed she often does, passionately desire 
knowledge and seek for it wherever she thinks she 
may find it in her restricted circle. Too tragically 
often she is baffled in her search. 

Some years before the war, when I was lectur- 
ing at a Northern University, a little incident 

227 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

opened my eyes to this fact. I was young and 
had not encounted this aspect of life before, and it 
burnt itself into my consciousness as one of the 
most vivid impressions of my life. It was this: 

One of my students was a women who was hop- 
ing to qualify as a medical doctor, and she was 
having tea with me and chatting about the events 
of the day. As part of her training she had been 
assisting the doctor in dealing with out-patients at 
a hospital, and a woman had brought in a miser- 
able little baby, which wailed all the time and 
which the mother explained wouldn't put on any 
flesh or grow into a nice, healthy baby whatever 
she did with it. 

The mother, with tears in her eyes, made an 
intensely earnest appeal to the doctor to tell her 
what was to her unaccountably wrong with the 
infant. This happened more than seven years ago. 
Thank God our racial attitude has changed since 
then. 

She was a fine strapping woman, and thought 
her babies ought to be large and healthy. She 
said this was her third or fourth, and the others had 
all died when they were very little. 

The doctor put her off with some soothing 
228 



THE COST OF COFFINS 

platitudes, but the woman driven to despair said: 
"I believe there's something wrong with my man. 
If there's something wrong with my man I won't 
have babies no more — it's just cruel to see them 
miserable like this and have them dying one after 
the other. Won't you, for God's sake, tell me 
whether there's anything wrong with my man or 
not?" This appeal was met by the assurance 
that there was nothing wrong, and she should go on 
having babies and do her duty by her husband. 

My medical woman student said that it was 
glaringly obvious that the baby was syphilitic. 

I asked her why she did not immediately tell 
the mother the truth. She shrugged her shoulders 
and said: "I've got my exam, to pass; if I did a 

thing like that Dr. would stop my going to 

the hospital. I can't afford to take risks like that. 
Why, he might not only stop me, but it would do 
the other women students a lot of harm too." 

This was before the war, and England was less 
enlightened, less eager for medical women's as- 
sistance than the war has made her, and it was 
then a fight for a girl to get a footing in the hospi- 
tals for the wide experience she needed for a general 
practice. 

229 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

I vowed to myself that I would never forget 
that mother, and that some day I would batter at 
the brazen gates of knowledge on her behalf. 

Here was a mother with a glimmering of the 
truth, seeking passionately for knowledge from the 
one person she had a right to turn to for this know- 
ledge, and she was put off with lies, encouraged 
again to bear the cost of a hopelessly doomed birth ; 
to risk the agonies of childbirth, to bring into the 
world a creature who for a short spell would be 
tormented and then would cost her a coffin. 

When this is put down on paper, I feel as though 
it would be ridiculous to begin to point out the 
monstrous cruelty and the monstrous folly of such 
an action as that doctor's. Yet such action is not 
isolated, it does not depend on one man's warped 
conceptions of loyalty to another unknown man 
"the husband." Since the war a public realiza- 
tion of the racial destructiveness of such diseases 
has been increased, and the woman and her hus- 
band would to-day be more liable to receive med- 
ical treatment. 

But even to-day if the mother had been told 
that there was " something wrong with her man," 
would she also have been told how in wise and 

230 



THE COST OP COFFINS 

healthy fashion she could herself supplement 
what his criminal negligence neglected. If a 
husband is careless and callous a woman must save 
herself, and the community, from the waste and 
the misery of irretrievably doomed births. 

She would indeed have been an exceptionally 
lucky woman if she had found in a public hospital 
a doctor to whom she could turn for knowledge 
how best to control conception, though such know- 
ledge is not only essential to her private well-being, 
but essential to her in the fulfilment of her duties 
as a citizen. 

By refusing his scientific advice, that doctor 
in reality sent that woman, whose desire to know 
was stirred, to the gossip of the slum alley and the 
street corner. There she would get a blurred and 
inaccurate, if not actually harmful, idea of what 
he should have been able to tell her in a clean, 
simple language based on scientific fact. 

This little incident is but one illustration of 
many aspects of the subject. It is not only disease 
which necessitates restraint on parenthood. No 
healthy woman can bear a long series of infants in 
rapid succession without loss both to them and to 
herself. This is discussed in my Wise Parenthood. 

231 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

Any one who thinks will see clearly that no 
civilized country, not even the richest in the world, 
can afford babies' coffins. Though they are 
smaller than grown-up people's, they are more 
costly, for they are waste, and nothing but waste. 
A grown-up individual, man or woman, has, we 
hope at any rate, given some return to the com- 
munity in work or in ideas for all that his life has 
cost. But the infant's death is sheer unmitigated 
waste. 

If all the mothers who realize this, and who feel 
their need for the best help that science can give 
them, would insist and persist in their inquiries for 
a knowledge of the most reliable results of modern 
science, they would in the end succeed in getting 
them. There is enough knowledge now in the 
world for the race to transform itself in a couple of 
generations. 



232 






CHAPTER XX 

CREATION OF A NEW AND IRRADIATED RACE 

Ah, Love! could thou and I with fate conspire 
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 
Would not we shatter it to bits — and then 
Remould it nearer to the Heart's desire. 

Omar Khayyam, circa 1050. 

ON parent's love for the helpless child depends 
the existence of our race. Human parent- 
hood necessitates not only the desire for 
offspring, but the willing care for them during the 
long years while they are helpless and dependent. 
Were this desire and willingness not deeply im- 
planted in us our race would become extinct, as in 
some strange way, the higher type of ancient Greeks 
vanished from the world. 

Not only throughout the lower creatures do we 
find the responsibilities of parenthood increasing 
as we go up the scale towards the higher, but, even 
in the various grades of highly civilized man, the 

233 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

responsibility for the children is ever greater in 
proportion with the general culture and position 
of the parents. 

Not many years ago, the labourer's child could 
be set to work early and could very shortly earn 
his keep; while, at the same time, the young 
gentleman was an expense and care to his father 
and mother until he had passed through the Uni- 
versity of Oxford or Cambridge, and amongst some 
even until he had made his "finishing" world tour. 
The trend of legislation has continuously extended 
the age of irresponsible youth in the lower and 
lower middle classes, until it now approaches that 
of the middle and upper class youth. A stride in 
this direction was taken by the last Education Act, 
which has made education compulsory throughout 
the whole country to an age which is practically 
university age. 

I need not labour the resulting effect of the ever 
increasing prolongation of youth. It is not only 
apparent but has received sufficient treatment 
from the hands of various authors and thinkers. 

Its corollary, however, has still not received that 
clear and direct thought which its significance 
demands. Parenthood under the present regime, 

234 



A NEW AND IRRADIATED RACE 

is not only an increasing responsibility and ex- 
pense, it has become so great a strain upon the 
resources of those who have for themselves and 
their children a high standard of living that it is 
tending to become a rare privilege for some who 
would otherwise gladly propagate large families. 

As Dean Inge reminded us {Outspoken Essays, 
1 91 9), there was a stage in the high civilization 
of Greece when slaves were only allowed to rear 
a child as a reward for their good behaviour. I 
find a curious parallel to this in our present com- 
munity. 

Crushed by the burden of taxation which they 
have not the resources to meet and to provide for 
children also : crushed by the national cost of the 
too numerous children of those who do not con- 
tribute to the public funds by taxation, yet who 
recklessly bring forth from an inferior stock, in- 
dividuals who are not self-supporting, the middle 
and superior artisan classes have, without per- 
ceiving it, come almost to take the position of that 
ancient slave population. It is only as a reward 
for their thrift and foresight, for their care and 
self-denial, that they find themselves able (that is 
allowed by financial circumstances) to have one or 

235 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

perhaps two children. Hence by a strange parallel 
working of divers forces, the best, the thriftiest, 
the most serious-minded, the most desiring of 
parenthood are to-day those who are forced by 
circumstances into the position of the ancient slave, 
and allowed to rear but one or two children as a 
result perhaps of a lifetime of valuable service and 
of loving union with a wife well fitted to bear more 
offspring. While, on the other hand, society 
allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the 
thriftless, the careless, the feeble-minded, the 
very lowest and worst members of the community, 
to produce innumerable tens of thousands of 
warped, and inferior infants. If they live, a large 
proportion of these are doomed from their very 
physical inheritance to be at the best but partly 
self-supporting, and thus to drain the resources of 
those classes above them which have a sense of 
responsibility. The better classes, freed from the 
cost of the institutions, hospitals, prisons, and so 
on, principally filled by the inferior stock would be 
able to afford to enlarge their own families, and at 
the same time not only to save misery but to mul- 
tiply a hundredfold the contribution in human life- 
value to the riches of the State. 

236 



A NEW AND IRRADIATED RACE 

The immensity of the power of parenthood, both 
on the personal lives which it brings into existence, 
and on the community of which each individual is 
to form a part, is not yet perceived by our States- 
men in its true perspective. 

The power of parenthood ought no longer to be 
exercised by all, however inferior, as an " individ- 
ual right." It is profoundly a duty and a privilege, 
and it is essentially the concern of the whole com- 
munity to encourage in every way the parenthood 
of those whose circumstances and condition is 
such that there is a reasonable anticipation that 
they will give rise to healthy, well-endowed future 
citizens. It should be the policy of the commun- 
ity to discourage from parenthood all whose cir- 
cumstances are such as would make probable the 
introduction of weakened, diseased, or debased 
future citizens. It is the urgent duty of the com- 
munity to make parenthood impossible for those 
whose mental and physical condition is such that 
there is well-nigh a certainty that their offspring 
must be physically and mentally tainted, if not 
utterly permeated by disease. That the com- 
munity should allow syphilitic parents to bring 
forth a sequence of blind syphilitic infants is a 

237 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

state of affairs so monstrous that it would be 
hardly credible were it not a fact. Yet I have by 
me a letter sent to me by race-conscious parents 
who were infected innocently, and after the birth 
of three successive syphilitic children, the mother 
was refused by her doctor all information in answer 
to her enquiries as to how she could prevent the crime 
of bringing such lives into existence. 

Parenthood, with the divine gift of love in its 
power, with the glorious potentialities of handing 
on a radiant, wholesome, beautiful youth should 
be a sacred and preserved gift, a privilege only to 
be exercised by those who rationally comprehend 
the counter-balancing duties. But so long as 
parenthood is kept outside the realm of rational 
thought and reasoned action, so long will we as a 
race slide at an ever increasing speed towards the 
utter deterioration of our stock through the reck- 
less increase of the debased, which is necessarily 
counter-balanced by the unnatural limiting of the 
families of the more educated and responsible, 
whose sense of duty to the unborn forbids them to 
bring into the world children whom they cannot 
educate and environ at least as well as they them- 
selves were reared. 

238 



A NEW AND IRRADIATED RACE 

In earlier generations, the child was taught to 
speak of its parents in a respectful and grateful 
tone as the "august authors of its being/ ' but this 
right and proper instruction in reverence was 
coupled with an arbitrary disposal of the child and 
a certain harshness in its training against which the 
later generations have revolted. As is usual, the 
reformers have deviated from rectitude in the op- 
posite direction, so that to-day to find children 
with deep respect for their parents is uncommon. 
Reverence is being exacted by some rather from 
the parent towards the child as a fresh, new, and 
unspoilt being. This too often results in spoiling 
the child, which is an equally foolish and hamper- 
ing proceeding. The child should be taught from 
its earliest days profound respect, reverence, and 
gratitude towards its parents, and in particular 
towards its mother, for of her very life, she gave it 
the incomparable gift of life. True parents give 
the child the best and freshest and most beau- 
tiful impulses of their lives, and, at the cost of 
bodily anguish the mother bears it, and its par- 
ents for long years nurture it, sacrificing many 
enjoyments which they might have but for the 
cost and care of rearing it. This should be real- 

239 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

ized by the child who then cannot but feel grati- 
tude to and reverence for the authors of its being. 

The sheer beauty of the world, were there no 
other gain from living, is so great that the gift 
of eyes and a mind to perceive it must place the 
recipient of that gift for ever in a reverential debt 
towards the pair who gave. 

But the value of the beauty of life, this just 
appreciation of the immense gift which parenthood 
confers cannot be realized by all. To-day, alas, 
millions are born into circumstances so wretched 
that life can scarcely involve a perception of 
beauty, or a probability of moral action and so- 
cial service. Also myriads of children are born 
of parents to whom they can feel that they owe 
nothing, because they know or inwardly perceive 
that they were not desired, that they were not 
profoundly and nobly loved throughout their 
coming, that they were hurled into this existence 
through accident, self-indulgence, or stupidity. 
Yet even parenthood which grants life on these 
terms is a wonderful power, a cruel and relentless 
force perverted from its divine possibilities. 

Youth tends ever to right itself if it but escape 
the taint of the profound racial diseases, and the 

240 



A NEW AND IRRADIATED RACE 

gift of a well-conditioned body is the creation of an 
incomparable set of co-ordinated powers in a world 
in which the potentialities for the use of those 
powers is magical. 

Innumerable are the efforts at present being 
made by countless different societies, official 
bodies, and individual reformers to diminish the 
ever increasing ill health and deterioration of our 
race, but their efforts are a fight on the losing side 
unless the fundamental and hitherto uncontrollable 
factors which make for health are there. 

Doctors may cure every disease known to 
humanity, but while they are so doing, fresh dis- 
eases, further modifications of destructive germs, 
may spring into existence, the possibility of which 
has recently been demonstrated by French scien- 
tists. 

Prisons and reformatories, municipal milk, the 
feeding of school children, improvement in housing, 
reform of our marriage laws, schools for mothers, 
even schools for fathers, garden cities — not all 
these useful and necessary things together and 
many more added to them will ever touch the 
really profound sources of our race, will ever cause 
freedom from degeneracy and ill health, will ever 
16 241 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

create that fine, glorious, and beautiful race of men 
and women which hovers in the dreams of our 
reformers. Is then this dream out of reach and 
impossible; are then all our efforts wasted? No, 
the dream is not impossible of fulfilment; but, at 
present, our efforts are almost entirely wasted 
because they are built upon the shifting sand and not 
upon the steady rock. 

The reform, the one central reform, which will 
make all the others of avail and make their work 
successful is the endowing of motherhood, not with 
money but with the knowledge of her own power. 

For the power of a mother, consciously exerted 
in the voluntary procreation and joyous bearing of 
her children is the greatest power in the world. It 
is through its conscious and deliberate exercise, 
and through that alone, that the race may step 
from its present entanglements on to a higher plane, 
where bodies will be not only a delight to then- 
possessors, but efficient tools in the service of the 
souls which temporarily inhabit them. 

I maintain that this wonderful rejuvenescence 
and reform of the race need not be a dim and dis- 
tant dream of the future. It is hovering so close 
at hand that it is actually within reach of those who 

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A NEW AND IRRADIATED RACE 

to-day are in their young maturity; we, at present 
in the flesh may link hands with grandchildren 
belonging to a generation so wonderful, so endowed 
and so improved out of recognition, that the miser- 
ies and the depravity of human nature to-day so 
wide-spread, may appear like a black and hideous 
memory of the past, as incredible to them as the 
habits of cannibals are to us. 

An ideal too distant, too remote, may interest 
the dreamer and the reformer possibly, but it 
cannot inspire a whole nation. An ideal within the 
range of possibility, that each one of us who lives 
a full life-time may actually perceive, such an ideal 
can spur and fire the imagination, not only of our 
own nation, but of the world. It is my prayer 
that I may present such a racial ideal, not only to 
my own people but to humanity. It is my prayer 
that I may live to see in the generation of my 
grandchildren a humanity from which almost all 
the most blackening and distressing elements have 
been eliminated, and in which the vernal bodily 
beauty and unsullied spiritual power of those then 
growing up will surpass anything that we know 
to-day except among the rare and gifted few. 
This is not a wild dream; it is a real potentiality 

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RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

almost within reach. The materialization of vital 
racial vision is in the hands of the mothers for the 
next twenty or thirty years. 

If every woman will but consciously and de- 
liberately exercise the powers of her motherhood 
after learning of those powers; if she bear only 
those children which she and her mate ardently 
desire; if she refuse to bear any but these, and if 
she so space these children that she herself rests 
and recovers vitality between their births, and 
during their coming she lives in such a way as I 
have indicated in the preceding chapters, and, if, 
at the same time, the deadly and horrible scourge 
of venereal diseases and all the multitude of 
ramifications of racial baseness are eliminated as 
they can be, then with a comparatively small per- 
centage of accidents and unforeseeable errors, the 
quality of those born will enormously improve, and 
by a second generation all should be already far 
on the highway to new and wonderful powers, to- 
day almost unsuspected. 

What are the greatest dangers which jeopardize 
the materialization of this ardent dream of a hu- 
man stock represented only by well-formed, de- 
sired, well-endowed beautiful men and women? 

244 



A NEW AND IRRADIATED RACE 

Two main dangers are in the way of its consumma- 
tion; the first is ignorance. It is so difficult to 
reach the untutored mind, to teach a public 
hardened and deadened to callousness, and the 
lack of dreams of their own; even though if one 
could but reach them it would be possible to make 
them understand. 

A second and almost greater danger is not a 
simple ignorance, but the inborn incapacity which 
lies in the vast and ever increasing stock of degen- 
erate, feeble-minded, and unbalanced who are now 
in our midst and who devastate social customs. 
These populate most rapidly ; these tend proportion- 
ately to increase; and these are like the parasite 
upon the healthy tree sapping out its vitality. 
These produce less than they consume, and are 
able only to flourish and reproduce so long as the 
healthier produce food for them; but by ever 
weakening the human stock, in the end they will 
succumb with the fine structure which they have 
destroyed. 

There appear then two obstacles which might 
block the materialization of my racial vision ; on the 
one hand the ignorance of those who have latent 
powers. This only needs to be stirred by know- 

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RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

ledge and the inspiration of an ideal to become 
potent. This obstacle is not unsurmountable. 
If one but speaks in sufficiently burning words, if 
one but writes sufficiently contagiously, the ideas 
must spread with ever increasing acceleration. 
Ignorance must be vanquished by winged know- 
ledge. I hold it to be the duty of the dreamer of 
great dreams not only to express them in such a 
way that cognate souls may also perceive them. 
It is the duty of a seer to embody his message in 
such a form that its beauty is apparent and the 
vision can be seen by all the people. The in- 
fectiousness of disease, the contagion of destruc- 
tive and horrible bacterial germs have become a 
commonplace in our social consciousness, and we 
have forgotten, and our artists have in recent years 
ever tended more and more to forget that the 
highest form of art should also be infectious. 
Goodness, beauty, and prophetic vision have as 
strong a contagious quality as disease if they are 
embodied in form rendered vital by the mating of 
truth and beauty. 

To overcome mere ignorance in others is, there- 
fore, by no means a hopeless task, and it is the 
valiant work of the artist-prophet. Youth is 

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A NEW AND IRRADIATED RACE 

the time to catch the contagion of goodness. To 
youth I appeal. 

The other obstacle presents a deeper and more 
difficult task. It must deal with the terrible 
debasing power of the inferior, the depraved, and 
feeble-minded, to whom reason means nothing and 
can mean nothing, who are thriftless and un- 
manageable yet appallingly prolific. Yet if the 
good in our race is not to be swamped and 
destroyed by the debased as the fine tree 
by the parasite, this prolific depravity must 
be curbed. How shall this be done? A very 
few quite simple Acts of Parliament could deal 
with it. 

The miserable, the degenerate, the utterly 
wretched in body and mind, who when reproduc- 
ing multiply the misery and evil of the world, 
would be the first to be thankful for the escape from 
the wretchedness entailed not only to their off- 
spring but to themselves by physical powers, 
uncontrollable by their diseased and depraved 
organisms. The Labour Party, all Progressives, 
and all Conservatives who desire to conserve the 
good, can unite to support measures so directly 
calculated to improve the physical condition, the 

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RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

mental happiness, and the general well-being of the 
human race. 

The idea of sterilization has not yet been very 
generally understood or accepted, although it is 
an idea which urgently requires assimilating by 
our civilization. I think that a large part of the 
objections to it, often made passionately and elo- 
quently by those from whom one would otherwise 
have expected a more intelligent attitude, is due 
to complete ignorance about the subject. Even 
otherwise instructed persons confuse sterilization 
with castration. The arguments which to-day in a 
chance discussion of the subject are always brought 
forward against sterilization have been, in my ex- 
perience, only those which apply to castration. 
To castrate any male is, of course, not only to 
deprive him of his manhood, and thus to injure 
his personal consciousness, but to remove bodily 
organs, the loss of which adversely affect his 
mentality and which will also affect the internal 
secretions which have a profound influence on his 
whole organization. I fully endorse the views of 
the opponents of this process. 

It is, not however, necessary to castrate, nor is 
castration suggested by those who, like myself, 

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A NEW AND IRRADIATED RACE 

would like to see the sterilization of those totally un- 
fit for parenthood made an immediate possibility, 
indeed made compulsory. As Dr. Havelock Ellis 
stated in an article in the Eugenics Review, Vol. I, 
No. 3, October, 1909, pp. 203-206, sterilization un- 
der proper conditions is a very different and much 
simpler matter, and one which has no deleterious 
and far-reaching effects on the whole system. The 
operation is trivial, scarcely painful, and does not 
debar the subject from experiencing all his normal 
reaction in ordinary union; it only prevents the 
procreation of children. 

It has been found in some States of America, 
and as I know from private correspondents in this 
country, there are men who would welcome the 
relief from the ever present anxiety of potential 
parenthood which they know full well would be 
ruining the future generation. 

There is also the possibility of sterilization by 
the direct action of X-rays. At present sterility 
is known as an unfortunate danger to those en- 
gaged in scientific research with radium, but it 
might, under control, be wisely used as a painless 
method of sterilization. This may prove of 
particular value for women in whom the operation 

249 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

corresponding to the severance of the ducts of the 
man is more serious. It appears however, not 
always to be permanent in its effect. 

With reference to the sterilizing effect of X- 
rays, the following quotation from F. H. Marshall, 
The Physiology of Reproduction, 1 910, is pertinent: 

A more special cause for sterility in men is one which 
operates in the case of workers with radium or the 
Rontgen rays. Several years ago Albers-Schonberg 
noticed that the X-rays induced sterility in guinea 
pigs and rabbits, but without interfering with the 
sexual potency. These observations have been con- 
firmed by other investigators, who have shown, fur- 
ther, that the azoospermia is due to the degeneration 
of the cells lining the seminal canals. In men it has 
been proved that mere presence in an X-ray atmo- 
sphere incidental to radiography sooner or later causes 
a condition of complete sterility, but without any 
apparent diminution of sexual potency. As Gordon 
observes, for those working in an X-ray atmosphere 
adequate protection for all parts of the body not 
directly exposed for examination or treatment is 
indispensable, but, on the other hand, the X-rays 
afford a convenient, painless, and harmless method of 
inducing sterility, in cases in which it is desirable to 
effect this result. 

Even to-day almost all the thriftiest and better 
of the working class, and the artisan class in par- 

250 



A NEW AND IRRADIATED RACE 

ticular, are already in the ranks of those who are 
sponged upon, and to some extent taxed, for the 
upkeep of the incompetent, and it is just from 
among the best artisan and from the middle class 
that the most serious-minded parents, and those 
who recognize their racial responsibilities, are 
principally to be found. There is throughout the 
whole Labour movement, as throughout the less 
vocal but deeper feeling of the middle class a 
passionate desire to eliminate the misery and 
human degradation which on every hand to-day 
saddens the tender conscience. The limiting of 
their own families to meet the pressure of cir- 
cumstances will never achieve their desires. The 
best to-day are making less and less headway, and 
the inferior are increasing more and more in pro- 
portion to them. To-day we are placing stum- 
bling blocks in the path of the little ones, and as 
Christ said, "Woe is unto us." 

Directly, however, the need for such legislation 
as I have outlined above is realized, and such legis- 
lation is passed, then the tide will be turned. Then 
at last, we will begin to see the elimination of the 
horror and degradation of humanity, which, at 
present, is apparently so hopeless and permanent 

251 



RADIANT MOTHERHOOD 

a blot upon the world. And then, and then at 
once will the positive effects of the conscious work- 
ing of love and beauty and desired motherhood 
begin to take effect. The evolution of humanity 
will take a leap forward when we have around us 
only fine and beautiful young people, all of whom 
have been conceived, carried, and born in true 
homes by conscious, powerful, and voluntary 
mothers. Then at last will God's will be done on 
earth and the power of Satan broken. 

Meanwhile the prison reformers, psycho-analysts, 
doctors, teachers, and reformers of all sorts will be 
going on with their reforms, and will be claiming 
this and that wonderful improvement in the school 
children, and they will probably never realize that 
it is not their reforms which have worked these 
apparent miracles; it is the change in the mother's 
attitude, the return to the position of power of the 
mother, her voluntary motherhood, the conscious 
and deliberate creation by the mother and her mate 
of the fine and splendid race which to-day, as 
God's prophet, I see in a vision and which might so 
speedily be materialized on earth. 



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